Comments on: Privacy Elitists Launch All-Out Attack on Personalized Advertising Online

By: The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:48:07 +0000

What We Didn't Hear at Yesterday's FTC COPPA Workshop...

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted an all-day workshop on "Protecting Kids' Privacy Online," which looked into the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and challenges posed to its enforcement by new technologic...

By: What We Didn’t Hear at Yesterday’s FTC COPPA Workshop

What We Didn’t Hear at Yesterday’s FTC COPPA Workshop — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:46:18 +0000

[...] explanation of the supposed harms of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Advertising-bashing is an old sport here in Washington, so I guess I should not have been surprised to hear several [...]

By: Picture Don Draper Stamping on a Human Face, Forever | Think Tank West

Picture Don Draper Stamping on a Human Face, Forever | Think Tank West — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:12:42 +0000

[...] an equally high premium on anonymity, it strikes me as unduly dismissive to suggest, as Berin Szoka does, that it’s inherently elitist or condescending to question whether most users are making [...]

By: Berin Szoka

Berin Szoka — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:16:45 +0000

As always, I appreciate Ed's thoughtfulness. There might very well be something to that concern if, indeed, users were helpless to protect their own privacy. But if a user really does feel that"they have no privacy," all they need do is change the cookie management settings in their browser and they will thwart nearly all online tracking.

If that's not good enough, let's talk about specific ways to empower users to control whatever else they might be worried about.

But as long as there's a feasible way for users to turn off tracking, Ed's argument amounts to the same tired saw that users just can't be trusted to take care of themselves.

We should be focusing on making these tools easier, not in changing the defaults, because that change does have real economic consequences for users.

By: Berin Szoka

Berin Szoka — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:16:45 +0000

By: Berin Szoka

Berin Szoka — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:16:45 +0000

By: The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:58:22 +0000

Privacy War II (Part 1): Attack of the Anti-Advertising Axis...

Seventy years ago yesterday, Hitler's troops invaded Poland. Thus began World War II--after twenty years of rising tension in Europe. For the next eight months, the world sat waiting for the other shoe to drop--the sitzkrieg (literally "sitting war...

By: Why Is EFF Suddently Supporting Internet Regulation? — Technology Liberation Front

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:40:48 +0000

[...] has already done a fine job tearing apart this latest effort by 10 activist groups to break the Internet by imposing burdensome [...]

By: Privacy War II (Part 1): Attack of the Anti-Advertising Axis — Technology Liberation Front

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:22:03 +0000

[...] beginning of Privacy War II: A coalition of ten “privacy and consumer advocacy” groups launched an attack of their own against targeted advertising, calling for sweeping preemptive privacy regulation to stop the [...]

By: eee_eff

eee_eff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:30:00 +0000

These so-called “consumer advocates” are actually anti-consumer elitists. Not only do they presume that consumers are too stupid or lazy to make their own decisions about privacy, but they ignore the benefits to consumers: more relevant advertising plus more and better content.

No, you can't make that charge stick. The consumer may want to protect their privacy by enacting the legislation that these groups are advocating. That is a straight-forward way of protecting privacy, by stamping out the problem at it's very source, rather than engage in a losing battle to plug all the sources of lost privacy at their perimeter.

In particular you have not addressed Ed Felten's excellent comment:

One of the standard claims about privacy is that people say they value their privacy but behave as if they don't value it. The standard example involves people trading away private information for something of relatively little value. This argument is often put forth to rebut the notion that privacy is an important policy value. Alternatively, it is posed as a "what could they be thinking" puzzle.

I used to be impressed by this argument, but lately I have come to doubt its power. Let me explain why.

Suppose you offer to buy a piece of information about me, such as my location at this moment. I'll accept the offer if the payment you offer me is more than the harm I would experience due to disclosing the information. What matters here is the marginal harm, defined as amount of privacy-goodness I would have if I withheld the information, minus the amount I would have if I disclosed it.

The key word here is marginal. If I assume that my life would be utterly private, unless I gave this one piece of information to you, then I might require a high price from you. But if I assume that I have very little privacy to start with, then selling this one piece of information to you makes little difference, and I might as well sell it cheaply. Indeed, the more I assume that my privacy is lost no matter what I do, the lower a price I'll demand from you. In the limit, where I expect you can get the information for free elsewhere even if I withhold if from you, I'll be willing to sell you the information for a penny.

Viewed this way, the price I charge you tells you at least as much about how well I think my privacy is protected, as it does about how badly I want to keep my location private. So the answer to "what could they be thinking" is "they could be thinking they have no privacy in the first place".