How Companies Use Personal Data Against People

[Wilson Grant Fisk]

Automated disadvantage and personalized manipulation? A working paper on the societal ramifications of the commercial use of personal information, with a focus on automated decision-making, personalization, and data-driven behavioral change.

Read: http://crackedlabs.org/en/data-against-people

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data
The data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules

Read: https://www.economist.com/news/lead...s-most-valuable-resource?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed

 

[jazzc]

Skimmed through the pdf report, its core objection is that companies are able to be efficient in their decision process and thus a) stop wasting tons of money in blanket advertising and b) acquire more customers by reducing the overhead that comes with less-informed decisions.

For example, it says that insurance companies being able to make more accurate projections and bill accordingly is a bad thing. Clearly the writers prefer that healthier people subsidize not-so-healthy ones by paying the overhead of "we are not allowed to know who and how many belong to risk category X". Genius.

On a) they prefer that you as an advertiser pay a bucketload for blanket ads on tv, instead of paying for only ads to 40-year-olds-who-like-golf in FB. I suppose because they love the big ad agencies that waste money?

One other thing they seem to hate is personalized pricing. The horror of being able to keep the selling volume but with increased profits by segmenting users probably keeps them awake at night. Because billing someone who earns $200k/y more on the same item than average and someone on $50k/y less than average on the same item, while increasing profits is bad for ... I don't know, the authors

 

[MisterF]

The supermarkets have been using purchasing data via loyalty cards for decades, Tesco were very active in this field.

Going back to the 1990s when Viking Direct hit the UK, they used to target buyers with discounted offers, then once you'd bought that item, they slowly hike the price up but target you with a new product at cheap pricing.

They used to have products with SKUs all the same except the first 2 letters, this was how they tracked what was working for them.

 

[selembar]

Not sure about the "Automated disadvantage and personalized manipulation".
Somehow I prefer seeing personalized ads, eg. semrush, ahrefs, webhosting, etc. than "this woman loss 10 pounds in 3 days".

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

There is a big difference. Almost any person can make money from oil, but only few can monetize data.
Let's make an easy example, huge data here on BHW about MMO. Instead of doing experiments using available info, everyday I see people asking how to make money.