Re: "could be a sensor on a road for the valid purpose of determining traffic patterns"
"An anonymous example? Company making Wotsits finds that 75% of units returned to retailers under warranty have a broken Thingy. Company redesigns the Wotsit MK II to have a thicker Thingy, or to use a more durable material to make Blahhhblahh..."
I fail to see how collecting user data and having a metric for every bit of user involvement makes a better thing ... this could easily be cordinated between manufacturer and sales outlet...
In fact if the product had been tested for its intended purpose it would be plainly obvious to even the janitor that said whotsit neended to be made more durable...
A better example would be to make great products that sell themselves last long and dont cost the priverbial arm n leg .... do that and you wont need to sell users data to all sorts of bottom feeders and worse ... make the net a fekken joyless contrived shit cake with a ribbin it seems fast becoming...
Your argument seems more like a marketing driod shtik about "great after sales" and "we care about your privacy" .... its like the emperiors new coat ...
A new economy of data which adds no value to the user nor in most cases the the recipiant of all the slurp.... controll groups are more often than not cagey about what they really think of product x and just came for the bisciuts and doughnuts... and a third of them will be friends with marketing driod to help them flatter the client so they get repeat business...
we have let people who make and create stuff all convince the people with stuff all between the ears that this is progress ...it's not
Anonomisied it may be, open source potentialy... but it's more bandwidth more compute and more resource ... roll your own ... now you need another processor and someone to manage it and its another attack vector.... for what exactly "insight"..please
National Geographic 42 cookies excluding whats termed legitimate interest and partners ...what insight could NG get from my single visit other than an interest in astronomy that would make the need for all of that slurp a benifit to me or their magazine
At best it's amozon showing me products i have already bought at worst it's sold to fuckwit politicos intent on scaring history by inteligengce researchers
who belive they can acurately gauge a populace's sentiment and droids who think the insights they get can be spun into a narative that paints a skewed version on reality that benifits niether the populace nor the creators of data...
Someware in the middle big data has a fantastic benifit to the whole wide world.... but while it sits with wealthy shareholders whose only contribution is to use wealth in pursiut of ever more power its an unsastainable dead end!
I feel bad for the folks who have do this sort of thing for a crust ...i do but it is what it is... just ask microshaft the OG of slurp ...are their products any better fuck no .... in fact i haven't used my M$ box in months cause it's to scary and stressfull... And i would tell them that.... all they had to do was ask!