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0 pointsbelorn9y ago0 comments

If a sale person stood on the street and offered people to install tracking software in their phones that will record every move, every call, every text, which the customer is told will be sold at a nice profit to any one thats willing to buy it with no oversight. At the end of one year, non-poor customer that the company earned profits from from will get a one time compensation of $20.

How many people will accept the deal, and why doesn't it already exist?

Or to ask a different question, will companies demand $20 for the services instead of offering it for tracking-as-payment? How will they fare against less polished services that are given away for free by people who run it on their spare time?

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3 comments · 2 top-level

Klathmon9y ago· 1 in thread

They exist, and they do very well. Things like Nielson and others have been doing something similar for many years, as well as countless surveys that can pay you, and both of my parents have installed on seperate occasions a toolbar which pays them pennies per day they keep it enabled, and when asked about it they were fine with it recording everything as long as they get their payout.

belornOP9y ago

I have seen those, but they are like you say about "pennies per day". Google could not survive on that.

If we are comparing a regular $40-$20 software sale to pay-by-tracking, then the people being tracked need to generate personal information that is worth equal amounts. It need to have mass market appeal in order to generate billions. How will pennies per day tool-bars do that?

s3r3nity9y ago

Well the information is not "sold" per se, as much as it's bundled with many other people, decoupled from PII, and is the equivalent of saying "10% of people talked about the football game today."

Further, I believe a service like Google Contributor does what you're implying, but it doesn't get much press - which doesn't surprise me: the overall market deems free content worth that privacy "trade-off."

I don't understand why this is necessarily a "bad" thing -- it's like the equivalent of a real-estate broker telling me that 10/20 houses on a block have 2 bedrooms, and the other 10 have 3 bedrooms, even though I know nothing about the people living in those houses.

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