{"text":[[{"start":6.96,"text":"You probably already know what sort of intrusive information about you is up for sale — even if you’d rather not think about it. Your age, your phone number and where you live. What you bought for lunch yesterday, where you went afterwards and who you stood next to. How hard you press the brakes in your car. What billboard you walked past and whether you ever bought the item advertised there. ln the online data brokerage market all of that is up for grabs — sliced, diced and packaged for purchase."}],[{"start":44,"text":"Given the quantity of data that is now constantly spilling out of us, it makes sense that some privacy fatigue might have set in. A few years ago I started taping over my laptop camera after seeing a photo of Mark Zuckerberg doing the same thing. If paranoia was good enough for a tech CEO, it was good enough for me. But this diligence didn’t last. When weather apps are selling your location and webcams are monitoring your eye movements, why bother with a piece of tape?"}],[{"start":75.52,"text":"In fact, why try to hide your data at all when you can be paid for it? Earlier this year a polling company called The Generation Lab attempted to set a price floor for personal information by offering young people an average of $50 per month to install a tracker on their mobile phones. The tracker doesn’t keep tabs on sensitive information like banking passwords, but pretty much everything else can be harvested. Scrolling habits, streaming choices and purchases — it’s all fed into a database for real-time analysis."}],[{"start":111.76,"text":"Is $50 per month a fair price for that level of scrutiny? The British mathematician Clive Humby was the first to come up with the phrase “data is the new oil” back in 2006. But the marketplace for this commodity, which is filled with private companies such as Fog Data Science, is opaque. Our personal information powers the digital advertising industry that underpins the internet. In return for surveillance, we get targeted adverts and free online services. What we don’t get is pricing clarity."}],[{"start":151.52,"text":"Untangling individual data sales is difficult. Payment offers can therefore seem arbitrary. Prior to 2019, Facebook was reported to have paid some teenagers up to $20 per month to track their online habits. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin offers about 25 tokens to those willing to have their eyeballs scanned by the biometric cryptocurrency company. This works out to less than $40. If you want an indication of how cavalier we have become about personal data, Worldcoin says it has already verified more than 12mn people."}],[{"start":197.4,"text":"Perhaps take-up is high because paid deals are rare. The Generation Lab’s co-founder Cyrus Beschloss says it has installed fewer than 1,000 phone trackers so far but received a lot more interest. Respondents liked the fact that the trade-off was explicit. Still, he acknowledges that some of the data being collected is more valuable than the price paid."}],[{"start":225.24,"text":"The problem with pricing data is that its value is variable. Phone numbers are relatively easy to access and not worth much. A 2023 study by law professor Justin Sherman at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy found that this sort of data about US military personnel was on sale for as little as 12 cents per person."}],[{"start":251.76,"text":"Location and health data are more difficult to obtain and so more valuable — especially when bundled up with thousands of other people’s. It depends who the buyer is too — whether another broker, ad tech company, law enforcement agency or government department. The Generation Lab says hedge funds have been particularly interested in the information that it is collecting."}],[{"start":278.12,"text":"All of this is above board. If you let an app track you and the app lets brokers buy the data then it’s fair game. In Europe, internet users must be notified about data collection and offered opt-outs (though these can be complicated). In the US, there is no federal privacy law."}],[{"start":298.28,"text":"Still, efforts to make data transactions more transparent are in the works. California governor Gavin Newsom once suggested that tech companies pay residents a “data dividend”. And US regulators have started to target brokers such as Outlogic (which began life as an app that stopped people sending drunk texts) to stop them from selling sensitive location data. Sherman says this is partly driven by concern about sales to rivals such as China."}],[{"start":330.92,"text":"These sorts of concerns will help campaigners who want data brokers to be more clear about exactly what they collect, how much they sell it for and who to."}],[{"start":342.52,"text":"Right now, $50 is a good deal because we lack the knowledge to come up with a more accurate price for personal information. But like oil, data is not a one-off extraction. Even if you’ve unwittingly handed out vast quantities already, there is always more to bargain with."}],[{"start":368.36,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftmailbox.cn/album/a_1758690602_8942.mp3"}