What's your [online] privacy worth? (Google Screenwise)

[CitizenCain]

Vely intervestink... to me, at least.

25 bucks a year seems to be above market rates, based on the fact that signups for the programs are currently suspended, less than 24 hours after it hit the news.

Anyway, the story:

Cash for Your Cache: Google's New Program Pays Users For the Right to Snoop

Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Thursday, Feb 09, 2012

The gradual transformation of the web into an ultra-personalized, corporate-owned social space in the cloud has raised more than a few legitimate concerns about data privacy. Google, for obvious reasons, has always been one of the top cheerleaders for this metamorphosis. Touting a fresh new privacy policy that allows data about you from all of their services to coalesce, they’ve recently been particularly bullish about rendering that increasingly realistic digital portrait of you that lies stuffed away in their servers. It has led us again to question: How much are we comfortable with our machines knowing about us? How much is our privacy really worth? With their new program, Google is now asking those questions quite directly, and preceding them with dollar signs. Are we all on the verge of making our own information age Faustian bargains?

That all depends on whether you think $25 in Amazon gift cards is appropriate compensation for surrendering your online privacy. The program, called Screenwise, is putting that on the bargaining table (at a rate of 5 Amazonian bucks every 3 months) in exchange for you agreeing to install a browser extension that sends all of your browsing data — the websites you visit and how you use them — directly to Big G. But even more curious is another, less publicized option that posits installing actual hardware — a nondescript black box — as a replacement internet router.

The box purportedly does a much more extensive job of monitoring usage data in your home network, and rewards users (currently limited to members of Knowledge Networks, an online survey and data-mining outfit) with more substantial amounts: $100 to sign up, plus $20 for each additional month of participation. According to an anonymous tip sent to Ars, the data will be shared with third parties such as “academic institutions, advertisers, publishers, and programming networks,” and will be personally identifiable unless secure / private browsing methods such as https were used. Thankfully, Google’s contract is non-binding (you can quit whenever you want) and they have announced in a statement that all participants have “complete transparency and control over what Internet use is being included in the panel.”

Google may be just now testing the waters of dollars-for-data deals with users, but the strategy isn’t anything new. Are these kinds of monetary reward systems the next logical step for the free service-for-data model used by Facebook and others? Perhaps in time, when the next privacy-invading pact is forged, we’ll wonder why the idea ever even bothered us.

I know that if I didn't have to work a "real" job these days (fuck you very much, federal government), I'd have that $25 heading my way too. Damn fucking work and government.

[Steely Glint]

I'm a socialist (or British), and therefore support government's quest to eliminate privacy

What exactly does the government have to do with this again?

[Khendraja'aro]

Needs a Halle Berry and/or Pie option.

Also, LittleFuzzy.

[CitizenCain]

What exactly does the government have to do with this again?

Just a dig against the UK surveillance state and culture... as well as a separate backhanded statement about the tendency of socialists/socialism to inevitably support and/or trend towards a society where the benevolent government overlords are entrusted with eliminating privacy by having all manner of personal data on all its citizens.

The question at bar has nothing to do with government, just a "what's your privacy worth to you" query. And, personally, I'd happily sell my personally identifiable browsing data to Google for $25 a year, and am upset that the fucking government has prevented me from making 25 free bucks for "nothing" as a result of their being moralizing, tyrannical cunts.

[Steely Glint]

The phrase "can't change his mind, won't change the subject" suddenly came into my head. Dunno why.

[emmawebb]

Interesting!

Illusions here. I'm leaving you up for a bit just in case you are linked to an actual person involved in spamming. Here at The World Forgotten, we take spam very seriously. Which is why you've likely noticed that your other spam cohorts have both had their messages deleted, and their accounts perma-banned. The More You Know!

[Ominous Gamer]

Alright, what the fuck is going on with the spam accounts?

[Loki]

Can we ban everyone who posted in this thread before me?

[CitizenCain]

The phrase "can't change his mind, won't change the subject" suddenly came into my head. Dunno why.

You should have someone look into that for you. Randomly, inexplicably hearing others' voices in your head one of the big warning signs for the onset of Schizophrenia, and you would be the right general age range for that to happen.

It being Churchill's voice you hear is probably related to your Britishness, though, and that's not any cause for concern. And hey, there's an upside to developing Schizophrenia... you'll never have to worry about being alone alone again. Always got those voices in your head to keep you company.

Alright, what the fuck is going on with the spam accounts?

Gotta be the Screenwise subject matter, I'd think. Massive spike... like a freaking vertical line on Googletrends and the other major search engine real-time tracking metrics. Since Screenwise made national news and all that, I think it's been the #1 search subject worldwide. Everyone wants to know how to get $25 to spend on the world's #1 etailer by "just using" the world's #1 search engine.

And now I can get my warm fuzzies and go to sleep happy, having done my part to help my fellow man - knowing that 3 poor SoB spammers in Turkey or BRIC or wherever made enough money to eat a fabulous feast feast for dinner, with change back to boot on the 1.3 cents (USD) they just made spamming in here.

Charity does feel good.

[Illusions]

Alright, what the fuck is going on with the spam accounts?

They're all dead now, and one was left alive to deliver a message to their owners.

I'll either ban it later, or someone else will.

Can we ban everyone who posted in this thread before me?

...nope.

[Dreadnaught]

I'm not sure why this has become much of a story. Companies like Comscore and Nielsen have spent the past decade paying people to be part of large, anonymized "panels" to extrapolate any number of trends for online behavior. The stats we read daily about site traffic, Internet usage, demographic info on Web users, etc comes almost entirely from these panels.

But as for what amount, a lot would depend on some of the terms. EG can I look at radical left-wing Islamist propaganda/pornography outside of the eye of the panel software or is it really 100% all-encompassing?

[CitizenCain]

It's not nearly 100% all-encompassing. You need to agree to use Chrome for your browsing, and link that browser to a Google account... and then the usage data is monitored by a Chrome plug-in thing.

So, you could, say, still use the ToR bundle to view your illegal barnyard bestiality porn and plot the exploding of the infidels... and in theory, even use IE for something else and FF for something else. Sounds a lot like free money for nothing to me - anything I'm not comfortable if the whole world knew about me, I don't punch into a browser linked to any of my Google accounts anyway.