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kleinbl00  ·  1301 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy

We don't need to stop it, we just need to be able to audit it and bid against it.

The thing that makes online advertising successful is that nobody who buys the ads can get any sort of proof that it works, therefore it's what the market will bear. Meanwhile, the price your privacy is sold for is appallingly low.

A company I worked for bought ads on Reddit. If I recall correctly we paid $20 for 100,000 people to see that ad 10 times a day for two weeks. That put Reddit's CPM (cost per mille or thousand impressions) at 70 cents. The minimum bid right now is something like 50 cents per mille... or in other words, every ad Reddit shows you earns Reddit one twentieth of a cent.

How many ads does Reddit show you in a day? Seems like something that could be catalogued and categorized. Assume Reddit shows me 80 ads a day. If I pay Reddit four cents, Reddit is revenue neutral with advertising. If I pay Reddit five cents they're at a 25% profit over selling me ads. Facebook is no different; they charge extravagantly for targeting but that extravagant fee per user is a pittance.

Take a counter-example. Yelp charges me ten.fricking.dollars to drive traffic to my site. Per user. Principally because nobody ever clicks. Ever. Take that ten bucks and divide it by everyone my name is shown to for every useless search Yelp does and let those Yelp users buy themselves out of ads. The number will work out to be pennies per month.

None of the internet companies want to do this, of course, because it will drive home the point that (A) they're charging whatever they fucking well feel like for (B) wildly ineffective sales methods that (C) are a privacy nightmare. A proper restraint-of-trade legal case - why can Procter & Gamble buy my data but I can't pay to keep it to myself? - would force the Internet into the same standards as television and radio. Which would probably drop their prices eighty percent.

And which would allow those people who want to save twelve cents a day to give Facebook however much personal info they want while the rest of us could pay twelve cents for Facebook to never sell any of our information.

The mistake is to believe that the compelling reason for privacy violations is value, rather than the lack thereof.