People have discussed companies paying for personal data for a long time and I think this is an exciting step in the right direction.
Not sure what your low effort comment is trying to say. That people shouldn't be able to sell their data?
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.