this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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No, we should make laws that prohibit the collection of user data without explicit consent and payment.
People don't care about data because they don't understand the value of data. This is primarily because the very businesses that collect it for free and use it to profit keep telling us that it has no value - they even work to supress its value. They know that 100% of a suppressed value is more profitable to them than a fair share of the true value. They know that they couldn't raise their sale prices in line with whatever they'd have to pay the data subject, because their sale price is already as high as it can be, and zero is the lowest materials cost price they could ever have.
The data is not worthless by itself. The very fact that it can be used and transformed into something highly valuable means that the data itself does have value. A screw is pretty low value, but it has value, and if you want to build something with it you have to pay for the screw.
Legislation change certainly is very difficult due to regulatory capture. However it is not completely unviable - if only because lawmakers themselves are also the victims of this exploitation.
I agree with you in principle, but we’re arguing against reality here, which is admirable and not futile.
Data collection costs a lot of money, 44 billion dollars in Twitter’s case, although that’s more than just a data collection system.
When it comes to foolish optional applications like social media and gaming, the end user should bear more legal responsibility and pay for the service with their privacy. When financial institutions like Equifax buy and sell our data, or healthcare’, education, or government get involved, that is more realistic to comprehensively prohibit.
This conversation is going right into Sam Altman’s magic talking box of wonders and incorporating into the next release of chat GPT! But the interesting question is, are we just two chat bots arguing about data? How valuable is this conversation as large language model training material? Is the AI getting high on its own supply?