Should really be equal to my monthly income since the only person I’d be remotely comfortable with this amount of private compromise with would be a significant other. And there’s no reason to settle.
It’s kind of a funny comment because I assume your significant other isn’t responsible for paying your monthly income (though such a thing is possible). Not a criticism of you I just found it funny, since I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise the way the sentence is constructed.
> The voluntary program could raise privacy concerns over how Amazon handles customer data.
"I signed up to let Amazon track data coming through my phone in exchange for $2 a month, and get this — you won't believe it — I think they might be violating my privacy!"
I wonder if anyone would sell it for $2. I bet they made their market research to come up with this ridiculous number for what they are asking to do to.
My wife is unemployed (and I don't think manual QA engineer without experience within the country is employable anymore) and trying to save every penny here and there, so it might actually work for her.
Not me because I have no money problem but if I did, why not?
It not much but the way I understand it, it is basically free money, you just check a box and you are tracked more, but other than that, no obligation on your part, and you don't get more ads.
Yeah, privacy, but you get tracked anyways, in fact, Amazon already has the most sensitive information about you: they know where you live, they have your credit card, and they know what kind of stuff you buy. If you trust them all that, you might as well send them the ads you see and get your $2.
And yeah, I guess they did their research. They probably don't want that many people to enroll in the program, and they are fine with the kind of profile $2 gets them. I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more.
> I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more.
Wouldn't they have a massive adverse selection problem unless the money is high enough to convince normies to sign up?
Amazon does a lot of these "micropayments" - e.g. $2 digital reward for receiving your order on Saturday instead of Tuesday. The micropayments must work for it
Those don't really have a downside, if you don't mind getting your package on Saturday. It's up to $4 now (presumably so they can plan out Christmas shipping) so my Kindle books are pretty much all free right now.
it's an interesting strategy to monitize digital products in a different way. I wonder if the royalties work the same way under this scheme, they must right?
For what it's worth, I run an eBay store and this is how their promotions work.
If you use a coupon (with a few exceptions, where the seller must explicitly opt-in), that comes off of eBay's bottom line. Same with eBay plus - we'll get an additional credit (usually AU$4) to cover the difference between regular and express shipping.
Of course, they more than make up for this by taking a 10% cut off everything you sell through their site.
>Honestly if someone offered me $2 a month to do absolutely nothing, I would still be offended by it.
$2 a month is $24 a year. So basically on par with a company giving you a free steak dinner on your birthday. Not life changing, but still pretty cool.
I took “watch” to mean record and concluded that Amazon is going to setup a new “marketplace” that competes with the likes of pornhub. I mean, why not at this point.
They’d sell your schedule to the highest bidder burglar and instructions how to get into the house and a breadcrumb trail to valuables in the house. Entry by summining Alexa and providing a one time use passphrase
> Because our protections against these forces have been thoroughly eroded and destroyed.
This gets trotted out every time there's a "big tech violating our privacy" story, and it's correct most of the time but not this one. Amazon is offering you a purely voluntary choice to sell your data. What "protections" have been "thoroughly eroded and destroyed" in this case? You're free to not sell your data. If anything, you need to do more work (ie. install the app and opt in) to have your privacy invaded.
Because people are suckers and keep falling for it. If no one took advantage of these "offers", these companies wouldn't bother.
That said, if they offered me more than a lousy $2, and all they were tracking was phone calls (not anything on chat/talk apps, just the actual voice calling), I'd sign up, because it's free money. Who the hell uses the phone any more? They want to pay to see how many robocalls I get?
Amazon specifically has you use their DNS server on a mobile device [0]. I imagine DNS allows them to get a confirmation of your identity when viewing ads served by Amazon on third party websites/apps. Their main page makes no mention on what rights they claim to DNS logs that are not related to ads, and I don't have the time or expertise to dive into their entire privacy policy.
Unless you change it to something else, the ISP-set DNS servers get all of these data anyway.
I use NextDNS an all my devices. The amount of data you can gather from them about a person is mind boggling, given the amount of telemetry most services use, and the trend of very low DNS TTL.
I know the gut intuitive reaction to this is negative-creepy, but I’d much prefer if all monetization of information about me and my shopping/behavioral patterns be this transparent.
Heck I’d like it if ad-based business models had some type of GDPR-ish regulation around it the required companies to divulge something like:
>Your use of this product/service is paid for by monetization of the following pieces of information about you.
>We estimate that this informational contributes $X in annual revenue based on the market value of your demographic to advertisers and data brokers
It’s what happens anyway, So why not? And of course I’d like there to be an opt out & option to simply pay for the service instead.
I'd prefer it if monetisation of my personal data is illegal because it's a scummy practice that ultimately leads to scummy companies. Which is pretty much a truism in this day and age.
It depends on where on earth you are, but here in Australia, for example, you can buy smartphones for about $10 when on special, or sometimes for free.
Came on, where is your sense of adventure? :) seriously, this kind of rabbit holes are one of the best parts of HN, and every body understand they are just rethoric exercises.
Obviously you wouldn't do it with just one phone - you'd get a cluster of several hundred/thousand.
I could definitely picture myself as a teenager getting a bunch of shitty old Android devices to make $20 a month, though. My younger cousins will fill out surveys with fake info to make a few bucks here or there.
$2 is so low that it's insulting. I'd rather pay tech companies to take my data, and I already do, since at least you usually get some sort of good or service in return, not a measly two bucks.
It's pretty exciting to see such a big company pilot a data profit sharing program.
Think of what it demonstrates. It acknowledges a standard that your personal data belongs to you, that they value it, and they are willing to pay you for it. More importantly, they are willing to do it in a upfront manner instead of trying to sneak it into some new application. Hopefully more companies will take note.
The whole premise of data privacy is that your data belongs to you, to do with it what you want, including selling it.
I'm normally very privacy-minded but tempted to agree to it just on a matter of principle to help get such a market off the ground.
Speculation: they might be questioning the implication that a paid surveillance program pushes data privacy/ownership values forward. Paying folks to be surveilled might be better than surveilling them without consent or reward, but it does incentivize the normalization of surveillance. And, depending on your economic beliefs, one could make the case it weaponizes the threat of poverty to drive that normalization.
Thanks for the constructive and insightful comment. I think there is some value to that perspective.
My main disagreement is that in the US at least, I feel that corporate surveillance is already normalized. Given that, I think this is an incremental step away from non-consensual surveillance, or at least surveillance where the transactional aspect isn't obvious.
Most people are already tracked by their phone apps, google, ect. It is normalized.
That's fair. I think, despite the normalization, there is still a general feeling the surveillance is non-consensual, and that basic skepticism might actually be more valuable than a meager payout for now-consensual surveillance.
At $2/month, the exchange doesn't really do anything but pay to normalize the idea of a consumer market for selling your personal data. And as other comments on the post have pointed out, this is just the starting point. If people will consent to x for $2, consenting to y for $4 or $10 or $50 dollars is officially on the bargaining table. Deeper and deeper behavioral data will only become more desirable as the AI arms race heats up, so I'm confident we can expect surveillance demands to grow in the coming years. The outcomes for personal data markets are self-evident.
I'm not about to agitate for laws against programs like these, but I don't think they're a good thing for society and they seem quite contrary to anything privacy advocates stand in favor of.
> And, depending on your economic beliefs, one could make the case it weaponizes the threat of poverty to drive that normalization.
As another commenter point out, this eerily reminds me of human organs trafficking. "People own their body, so shouldn't they be allowed to sell their organ?". We don't allow such things because this directly impacts people with low-income. Now admittedly one's organ is not comparable to one's information, but my stance on this is that privacy should be human rights, non negotiable.
This is a huge development and change to the landscape. I wonder how many corporate value estimates are being rewritten across the sector, knowing a bit more about how users are valued/what companies may have to pay to motivate them to make ad targeting work properly.
Thinking about it, do we have Apple to thank for this?
Recently I received several emails from Amazon offering me $15 if I would start using their Photos service. Never read the fine print, but that sounds skeezy - like they're trawling for more raw material to train ML systems on.
At least they're more upfront about it than the dozens/hundreds of other companies that are doing this to users for $0 a month (ISPs, mobile network operators, apps, etc.).
I'm not selling my data for 2$, or 10, or 100. Regardless of that, I still think this is a nice move from amazon.
People complain all the time that companies are stealing their data, then amazon comes in and offers to buy and people complain again... Yeah 2$ is away too low for a lot of people, but it's better than 0 for a start, hoping it will just go up from here.
Amazon's cost-per-mille prices are much much higher for this type of super targeted reach, so $2 a month is peanuts in my view. Nevertheless, it's a great idea to start offering people a choice in which they understand and have a choice to monetize their own data.
.. given the many relevant and persistent Amazon connections I have blocked at my firewall, I'd say Amazon is already collecting a vast amount of data to the unsuspecting user already. so .. no.
and for that paltry sum, not even worth it set up an old iPhone loaded with scripts and apps purely to muddy the data.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] thread"I signed up to let Amazon track data coming through my phone in exchange for $2 a month, and get this — you won't believe it — I think they might be violating my privacy!"
It not much but the way I understand it, it is basically free money, you just check a box and you are tracked more, but other than that, no obligation on your part, and you don't get more ads.
Yeah, privacy, but you get tracked anyways, in fact, Amazon already has the most sensitive information about you: they know where you live, they have your credit card, and they know what kind of stuff you buy. If you trust them all that, you might as well send them the ads you see and get your $2.
And yeah, I guess they did their research. They probably don't want that many people to enroll in the program, and they are fine with the kind of profile $2 gets them. I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more.
Wouldn't they have a massive adverse selection problem unless the money is high enough to convince normies to sign up?
If you use a coupon (with a few exceptions, where the seller must explicitly opt-in), that comes off of eBay's bottom line. Same with eBay plus - we'll get an additional credit (usually AU$4) to cover the difference between regular and express shipping.
Of course, they more than make up for this by taking a 10% cut off everything you sell through their site.
$2 a month is $24 a year. So basically on par with a company giving you a free steak dinner on your birthday. Not life changing, but still pretty cool.
Why are we creating these fresh new hells all the time?
Democratic government is no longer working for us but rather against us, for the "elite" class that have bought it out from under us.
This gets trotted out every time there's a "big tech violating our privacy" story, and it's correct most of the time but not this one. Amazon is offering you a purely voluntary choice to sell your data. What "protections" have been "thoroughly eroded and destroyed" in this case? You're free to not sell your data. If anything, you need to do more work (ie. install the app and opt in) to have your privacy invaded.
That said, if they offered me more than a lousy $2, and all they were tracking was phone calls (not anything on chat/talk apps, just the actual voice calling), I'd sign up, because it's free money. Who the hell uses the phone any more? They want to pay to see how many robocalls I get?
[0] https://panel.amazon.com
I use NextDNS an all my devices. The amount of data you can gather from them about a person is mind boggling, given the amount of telemetry most services use, and the trend of very low DNS TTL.
Heck I’d like it if ad-based business models had some type of GDPR-ish regulation around it the required companies to divulge something like:
It’s what happens anyway, So why not? And of course I’d like there to be an opt out & option to simply pay for the service instead.If other companies start paying for your “data”. Load them up. Rinse and repeat.
edit: disable microphone if paranoid or wrap in a sound deadening material.
[1] Obviously using the solar generated power for something else to save on electricity might be more effective, but where is the fun in that?
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.xapek.andiodine/
> $12.30: 5W 5V Portable Solar Panel Power Bank Phone Charger
[1] https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/403705119852
I could definitely picture myself as a teenager getting a bunch of shitty old Android devices to make $20 a month, though. My younger cousins will fill out surveys with fake info to make a few bucks here or there.
Think of what it demonstrates. It acknowledges a standard that your personal data belongs to you, that they value it, and they are willing to pay you for it. More importantly, they are willing to do it in a upfront manner instead of trying to sneak it into some new application. Hopefully more companies will take note.
The whole premise of data privacy is that your data belongs to you, to do with it what you want, including selling it.
I'm normally very privacy-minded but tempted to agree to it just on a matter of principle to help get such a market off the ground.
They think they can make money on the data and willing to pay a user for the data that they use.
I haven't seen that before in the general consumer space.
Nice try
Not sure what your low effort comment is trying to say. That people shouldn't be able to sell their data?
My main disagreement is that in the US at least, I feel that corporate surveillance is already normalized. Given that, I think this is an incremental step away from non-consensual surveillance, or at least surveillance where the transactional aspect isn't obvious.
Most people are already tracked by their phone apps, google, ect. It is normalized.
At $2/month, the exchange doesn't really do anything but pay to normalize the idea of a consumer market for selling your personal data. And as other comments on the post have pointed out, this is just the starting point. If people will consent to x for $2, consenting to y for $4 or $10 or $50 dollars is officially on the bargaining table. Deeper and deeper behavioral data will only become more desirable as the AI arms race heats up, so I'm confident we can expect surveillance demands to grow in the coming years. The outcomes for personal data markets are self-evident.
I'm not about to agitate for laws against programs like these, but I don't think they're a good thing for society and they seem quite contrary to anything privacy advocates stand in favor of.
As another commenter point out, this eerily reminds me of human organs trafficking. "People own their body, so shouldn't they be allowed to sell their organ?". We don't allow such things because this directly impacts people with low-income. Now admittedly one's organ is not comparable to one's information, but my stance on this is that privacy should be human rights, non negotiable.
If someone asked to pick out the cans from my recycling, I don't see that as a critique of my personal value.
For instance, I'd happily take $5/month to let them spy on my usage of Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so it would be a free $5/month!
Thinking about it, do we have Apple to thank for this?
Recently I received several emails from Amazon offering me $15 if I would start using their Photos service. Never read the fine print, but that sounds skeezy - like they're trawling for more raw material to train ML systems on.
People complain all the time that companies are stealing their data, then amazon comes in and offers to buy and people complain again... Yeah 2$ is away too low for a lot of people, but it's better than 0 for a start, hoping it will just go up from here.
and for that paltry sum, not even worth it set up an old iPhone loaded with scripts and apps purely to muddy the data.