I think it's worth pointing out that the comment you replied to didn't mention money, advertising, or CTR. People are concerned about data collection for more reasons than that. You've seen these attempts and entire careers about it without "juicing" CTR, so perhaps that isn't the true intent.
I admit that I inferred the proposed intent for grabbing maximum personal data, but if you’re interested in anecdotes from the trenches: no one below senior director level gets a couple million in stock for any other reason than they pushed CTR by a few basis points. What I was trying to say is that seen through the lens of mechanism design no one is incentivized to query the like button table because there’s no upside in it.
I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data?
Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?
I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.
That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.
Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it.
The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach."
The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.
The fact that so much potentially sensitive data exists in a few repositories is in itself a bit foreboding. Who knows what companies will be able to glean from it one, five, or twenty years down the road?
My behavior on the web being tracked by corporations with little incentive to do right by me is worrisome.
I’m more concerned that they’re designing the next version of the Web right under our noses than that they know what kind of sneakers I’m 8% more likely to buy.
However, I’m concerned that the data also allows them to see that I am 93% more likely to vote for a certain political candidate, 22% more likely to contract a chronic disease in the next ten years, and 16% more likely that I will have a friend that homosexual.
I'm not thinking about ad delivery, I'm thinking about behavioral analysis. Knowing how a person thinks and acts can be a very useful weapon in the wrong hands, and FB and the like have done nothing to make me think their hands are the right ones (I don't think any are really.)
I'm not sure where to add this comment, but I just wanted to briefly say that I appreciate your contributions to this topic. Both in terms of content and tone/delivery. These seem like constructive and valuable comments to me, so thanks!
I think the implication was that the leadership is hanging onto all that data because of an immediate fiduciary obligation. I suspect that it’s more in the nature of when you’re running a business in which a few hundred million QPS is slow that you archive in case it ever becomes useful.
Unless the point of your comment was to deny that Google is collecting this data at all (because, according to you, there's no financial incentive), I don't see the relevancy of your criticism. The complaint of the top level comment was that Google is collecting extremely personal data on us. Your response is that Google doesn't have an immediate financial incentive to do this. If you're not actually denying that Google collects this data, why does that matter? For most of us, the fact that our personal data has some financial value to a corporation is irrelevant to the fact that we don't want them to have it.
