
I Might Be Spartacus: a differential privacy marketplace - mbaytas
https://robertheaton.com/2018/10/27/i-might-be-spartacus-a-differential-privacy-marketplace/
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0xname
While the idea of selling and controlling one's own data is enticing, would
people actually be willing to set up the requisite hardware/software to manage
it all? I can imagine a sort of "black box" that manages user preferences but
for the average person who doesn't necessarily care about privacy, the
proposition of earning a few dollars a month doesn't seem like a strong
motivator.

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taurath
Everyone has a phone, and a private cloud to securely store data is not
terribly insecure if done right. Life-Privacy as a first class feature of
mobile OSs could be a huge opportunity to giving people more control over
their data. I don’t see google doing this, but Apple could.

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anonymousDan
Interesting, but what's to prevent the person selling the data from completely
fabricating it (as opposed to following noise according to some differential
privacy algorithm)? Or is the assumption that enough data owners are truthful
that you could filter out this behaviour?

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pythonaut_16
Could this be a useful model to apply to analytics and tracking?

Selective sampling is already common (run X diagnostic 10% of the time). Could
you say to a user of your application "Hey, we are tracking these X
parameters, but applying Y degrees of uncertainty to your individual data."

I'm not pro-tracking by any means, but would this be a reasonable improvement
to users' privacy without first needing to convince companies to stop all
tracking wholesale?

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jka
This is definitely a step forward in thinking regarding 'personal data
control', but if you imagine 'data brokers' as the potential attacker here,
and assume that their goal is to sell your information to the highest bidder,
they still have some opportunity here.

They could/would form 'data validation' companies who would investigate the
plausibly-deniable facts you had been distributing. For example, the validator
could buy your age from five different vendors and likely end up with a pretty
good approximation of your real age.

Ok, perhaps this creates a 'data marketplace' and there would be competition -
but the situation is ultimately very similar to credit scoring agencies
(Equifax et al), and clearly something is wrong in that industry.

There'd be ample opportunity for these data validators to follow the same
pattern as credit scoring agencies and charge third parties for access to the
validated data. And possibly even charge people to have details corrected.
Regulation might help, but regulatory capture happens.

Some good ideas here and it'd be great to develop this further and make it
more robust from attack.

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kouohhashi
Idea is very interesting and smart but I don't think people want to sell their
data consciously. If Facebook get our data without our knowledge, it's kind of
like acceptable but I don't think people push button to give away our data.
It's a huge cognitive hinderance. And data can have value only when the volume
is big. Since each data(small datasets) has almost zero value, i don't think
it's expensive/attractive enough for us to push the button to sell it.

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eksemplar
The article talks about it, but it seems too fantastical to me. I mean, what’s
the business model really? Facebook earns around $2.5 a year per user, is
enough people really going to bother selling their data for almost nothing?

