
The Economics of Privacy (2005) - jstrieb
https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/economics-privacy.htm
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csense
It's interesting how so many stores now have rewards systems. You can get $X
off your purchase today _if you sign up for this program so we can track you_.

This is basically a system that makes people an offer to sell their privacy. I
think it would be fascinating to look at statistics for how many people opt-
out of these programs, and how much the annual cost of non-participation is
for an ordinary lifestyle.

~~~
johncarmichael3
What is more interesting and much less monetized is buy-outs, I would pay a
premium monthly for an opt-out of Twitters tracking of my account for
instance. I know many people who say the same thing about Facebook, if these
places switched to a simple Netflix model and allowed us to pay our way out of
their tracking services I would pay the same amount advertisers pay for my
info to keep it out of their hands.

I think the reason why they don't offer this is because it would probably come
off as sounding 'randsom-y' or something.

~~~
pinkythepig
Isn't this model already relatively heavily used? There are loads of apps that
have a free ad supported version, but if you pay for it, all ads are removed.

They could spin it in a similar way:

Ad supported version is free. As part of this free service, you are tracked
extensively to build a valuable profile for sale to ad companies.

By paying for the service, all ads and the associated tracking required to
make your profile valuable to advertisers is disabled.

In this way, the tracking is spun as a necessary evil for the ad supported
model to work.

This would probably require them to be pretty open about what sort of tracking
is going on.

