

Surveillance is the Business Model of the Internet: Bruce Schneier - tapp
http://www.securityweek.com/surveillance-business-model-internet-bruce-schneier

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So, a couple things:

I wish I had copies of the decisions handy, but the supreme court appears to
not believe that quantity is a quality all its own. That is, until quite
recently, the amount of surveillance the police or government could pull off
was severely limited by personpower: how many employees they where willing to
dedicate. Technological considerations, such as the ability to shove a gps
tracking device into a car or use mobile phone tower checkins to get a pretty
precise idea of where people have been, have considerably changed this, but
the supreme court doesn't seem to think that a change in scale means the law
should change. So privacy will probably require support from congress, which
is unfortunately filled with the stupid, the venal, and people like Difi who
doesn't care a wit about surveillance unless and until she is surveilled.

Also, people are stupid. I saw somewhere -- again I'm missing a reference --
that fb makes on the order of $20-$40 per US user per year. Given the quantity
of employees and infrastructure dedicated to monetization via advertising,
you'd think they'd be willing to take that much money in exchange for no
advertising and come out ahead. So if the US would agree to pay $25/year, we
could have ad-free fb (and a fb executive staff motivated by users' needs,
where users == you and me, not advertisers.) Unfortunately, people are stupid,
so they will never bite. They will, if they can be bothered to care at all,
simultaneously bitch about advertising and privacy while being completely
unwilling to pay money for services. I have no solution at all for this, but
it makes me sad.

~~~
a3n
Facebook may see more potential profit from advertisers than from consumers.

If Facebook can come up with a way to dramatically increase an advertiser's
provable ROI, advertisers will kill each other to get to the front of the
line. "You mean we can suck even _more_ money out of Facebook users by knowing
even _more_ about them, thereby influencing them even _more_ effectively?" In
fact "advertisers" can probably make a good ROI from their Facebook spending
without ever showing you an ad in Facebook, just by data mining and tailoring
their non-Facebook ads. Just because you don't see an ad doesn't mean you
haven't been sold.

If Facebook were $25/year for a no advertising account, would Facebook
consumers elbow each other out of the way to pay $50/year for more effective
ways to see what their friends ate for breakfast? Probably not. And besides,
you'd probably still be sold to advertisers as data per the previous
paragraph.

I pay for email and I pay for bookmarks (and I don't have a Facebook account).
I have a low grade chronic fear over what will happen when my email and
bookmark providers can no longer increase their profit to their satisfaction,
or to their investors' or acquierers' satisfaction.

