This is a completely anecdotal story of how I found the price of my privacy recently. I self identify as a privacy nut. I don’t Facebook, I don’t use google. I’ll pay for privacy conscious services vs. using so called ‘free’ services, but I recently had an experience that gave me a bit of a different viewpoint.
My wife also doesn’t have Facebook, for her it’s more of a time suck then privacy reasons. For the most part she hears me talking about privacy, knows it’s something I care a lot about, and is happy to go along with me. However, she recently learned about a couple apps that give you money back. Walmart pay and iboutta. Without a doubt these apps are tracking all sorts of things and building profiles and selling our information. I’m totally against it... but she loves getting the money back. “Oh you know that yogurt we got from Walmart? Turns out Kroger had it on sell for 50 cents off and we got reimbursed $5!” It really makes her happy. I’m thinking to myself that I would have rather spent that $5 and had kept my privacy, but I end up keeping that to myself. It’s something she really enjoys.
On the other side, it does get into a more devious side of privacy issues. You don’t need everyone to give up their privacy rights- you just need a few to give up the privacy of everyone they know.
My wife also doesn’t have Facebook, for her it’s more of a time suck then privacy reasons. For the most part she hears me talking about privacy, knows it’s something I care a lot about, and is happy to go along with me. However, she recently learned about a couple apps that give you money back. Walmart pay and iboutta. Without a doubt these apps are tracking all sorts of things and building profiles and selling our information. I’m totally against it... but she loves getting the money back. “Oh you know that yogurt we got from Walmart? Turns out Kroger had it on sell for 50 cents off and we got reimbursed $5!” It really makes her happy. I’m thinking to myself that I would have rather spent that $5 and had kept my privacy, but I end up keeping that to myself. It’s something she really enjoys.
On the other side, it does get into a more devious side of privacy issues. You don’t need everyone to give up their privacy rights- you just need a few to give up the privacy of everyone they know.