At pii2010, it’s frequently argued that privacy is something that you’re increasingly going to have to pay for – and that people will, in fact, pay money to preserve their privacy. (I haven’t seen any evidence for this, but venture capitalists are investing in the space, so it must be true.) This argument is then followed by concern for the poor – since in a world where privacy is paid for, the poor won’t be able to afford it, and therefore will have to trudge along in their not-so-private dystopia. This then leads to talk of regulation and rights.
Let’s assume the cost of preserving one’s online privacy is equal to the value extracted from ‘lack of online privacy’ – by which I mean behavioral targeting for ad serving – plus a little bit more just to eke out a profit. How much money do people think that actually is? I suspect most of us assume our data is dramatically more valuable than it actually is. We’re all good narcissists with healthy egos, after all, and we just don’t want to accept that all that internet browsing we do is worth a few bucks per year at best. So ‘protecting our privacy’ by blocking most targeting, rationally priced, shouldn’t be much more than a few bucks a year – a small expense that even the American poor can afford, considering they pay several times more than that each month for their internet connections. Of course there are billions of people in this world that are poorer still, but their online privacy isn’t worth violating – if they’re even online at all. Marketers don’t target people without money.
It would be useful, and add some rationality to debates around privacy, for some advertising technology firms to estimate the true worth of a typical individual’s behavioral targeting data. With this information, we can figure out what a sensible price for protecting privacy should actually be, and stop worrying so much about whether the poor can afford it. Of course, even sensibly priced, large numbers of people aren’t going to pay for their privacy. But that’s a discussion for another time.
