Your data's auctioned off up to 987 times a day, NGO reports The average American has their personal information shared in an online ad bidding war 747 times a day. For the average EU citizen, that number is 376 times a day. In one year, 178 trillion instances of the same bidding war happen online in the US and EU. That's according to data shared by the Irish Council on Civil Liberties …
... that pays for a free internet..
Now, that's not true, is it? We simply pay no money at the time of usage but it is not free in the medium to long term..
We pay with our data which is intended to benefit the company that acquired it.
This usage must have downstream effects which are not to our benefit, otherwise companies would not have paid good money for it.
It has a value for a reason and we pay for that down the line.
Many of us would gladly pay content producers a reasonable monthly fee if they offered such an option insread of ads and if they produced higb quality content.
Instead each page is laden with 50+ 3rd party obfuscated javascripts doing God knows what in the background, and most of the content published on internet isn't worth the electricity involved in serving it.
By the way, they aren't paying for my CPU cycles and electricity which their website uses while runing its code on my client machine instead of on their server.
Your logic is incomplete. There is no self-evident reason why the usage of data by third parties must be detrimental to us.
We're all agreed, we all pay for the "free" Internet. What this article is about is the mechanism by which that payment is made, collected and monetised.
I suspect, based on the SPAM emails that the mail server gets all the time to non-existent email addresses, that this high data number indicates that the people selling the data are also inventing the data. If they have 10,000 datasets to sell, then they are adding a nice proportion to boost the sale.
I think the solution is contained in the title-
Your data's auctioned off up to 987 times a day
Normally in an auction, I place an item for sale. If it sells above any reserve, I get the proceeds minus auctiioneer's fees & taxes.
The Internet, of course, does things differently. So when my data is auctioned off, even though it's 'mine', I get none of the proceeds. It'd be kinda like me wandering into Google's offices, or exec's homes and auctioning off their property. Which kinda happens, ie taking stuff to flog on Ebay, but that's typically considered theft.
So to normalise things, a simple solution would be to pay me whenever my personal property (properties, or metadata) is flogged off. I should be able to set a reserve, say $1m, or 1 bitcoin. Or just a standard auction fee of say $10 every time my properties are flogged off.
Simple really. Well, other than potential tax implications. Regulators could start with a $10 fee, and maybe reduce it to $5 or even $1, or just let data subjects set their own price.
Last time I looked I paid for my service above and beyond my basic telephone line therefore that comment is fundamentally incorrect.
If it were true, can I please have the specification and cost of a basic paid-for service option that provides a simple tick box that I have to *uncheck* (as per privacy regulations) to not include such personal data slurping?
I think you're missing the point that you pay for your end of the bit pipe, and your ISP pays some of that to the people who run big fat bit pipes around the world.
What you haven't paid anything towards is anyone else's connection to the bit pipes - and that includes those serving up web pages etc. Your argument is a bit like buying a car (talking UK here) and paying your taxes - then complaining that the ferry company wants paying to carry your car across the channel, and the French want to charge you for using their roads.
I agree with the others, and the bit right at the end of the article. A lot of what people expect to get "for free" is currently paid for through advertising (and the privacy invasions that make it more lucrative) as there's no viable alternative at the moment.
I do actually pay to certain services I use - even though some of them are usable without. But the ones where the choice is offered, and the value is enough to make separate subscriptions viable, are a very small minority.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
If you don't hear it then it's fallen on you. Nursery school philosophy. Is it a brown tree, or would someone else see it as blue?
If you were lost in a forest and you didn't have a signal would somebody else track your phone? Well, they could. Last known position, last known direction, start the search there.
I got lost in a forest on an outwards bound course when I was 14. No water, no food, but two pretty girls. Shamefully I did not try my best to evacuate us quickly, never mentioned my map and my compass, rather focussed on my sleeping bag. Some heroic divvy rescued us - them. Ach.
You can fairly accurately estimate the age of an oak by measuring it's width about four feet high. But then that applies to me too.
"I wonder how much advertisers pay for their ads that are filtered out by my ad-blocker?"
I would depend on how your ad blocker works. If your computer is doing the filtering by not displaying the ads, yes, they get paid. If the way you block the ads prevents them from being downloaded from the ad server, maybe not.
I clicked my 1st ad link in a very long time
I did this in my phone
The same ad now appears on
My laptop
My phone
My works laptop
My VM on my works laptop
It is ridiculous as I now will NOT buy the t shirt on principal.
It’s not really optional to have a system that says we will spam you to death or make an account and we will spam you to death but the spam might be a bit more relevant.
>>The same ad now appears on
Hmmm, here in the U.S. I've never really had problems with online ads
but... I run NoScript, VPN, AdBlock and "special" email/phone numbers ( valid alternate contact, I just rarely check either ).
What I have noticed recently is an increase in phone calls to my cell phone, even though it is listed with the National Do Not Call Registry ( https://www.donotcall.gov ).
So... I'd REALLY like to know how that contact info was collected and who's selling it.
One suspect is Verizon as I recently switched to that cell provider - not sure how to prove it though.
"What I have noticed recently is an increase in phone calls to my cell phone, even though it is listed with the National Do Not Call Registry "
The worst scammers use that list as a source of valid cell phone numbers. You can register your number on that list but nothing is done if you are on it or not.
Total up the amount of energy that such “targeted” ads require beyond that needed for context-based ads? The data harvesting, storage, and auctions surely consume a huge amount of electricity yearly. Should include the extra power usage on user devices.
Then estimate the carbon emissions. The environmental impact would be good ammunition for getting rid of this nonsense.
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