Your personal data is worth a measly eight bucks a month You've heard it a zillion times by now: if an online service is free, you are the product. A New York company called Datacoup is trying to turn that notion on its head a bit, by paying you if you let it monitor your online activities and also let it tap into a stream of information about your credit and/or debit card. In …
Nah, the credit card thing is easy - just get a second card on a fake name. Nobody checks because they have a primary account holder (you) so KYC demands are satisfied, and in the UK the address on a letter matters more than the name so the delivery address is not going to be an issue either. However, it means you're now throwing nuts into the data collection gears because the monitoring is typically on a name basis.
So what this really does is to monetise the data that hackers already go phishing for.
Now, instead of them selling lists of names, cards and personal data to some nefarious individual or group, for pennies, they'll approach this outfit instead - and get many times the moolah for the same information.
There's a scary thought that this is just a front for someone's government surveillance scheme - in an attempt to legalise their snooping "Look! they GAVE us the data and we're paying for it - it's not spying anymore (and it costs a dam' sight less, too).
There's an even more scary thought that by upping the rate paid for personal data, all this outfit is doing is increasing the demand for it - and therefore attracting more hackers to try and pry it off you.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Pete 2, but you're already selling us ALL your personal data. What do you mean, you didn't know that?"
Another VERY big advertising company has forked Linux and is paying huge salaries for keeping it entertaining enough just to offer them free to the individuals in order to collect their personal info.
So, business model of Datacoup is not much different, they are just being honest and rude.
Next, we'll see a van down the road throwing breads at us.
> Another VERY big advertising company has forked Linux and is paying huge salaries for keeping it entertaining enough just to offer them free to the individuals in order to collect their personal info.
I'm sorry, Google Translate isn't helping me with this one; could you repost in English?
I'll see what I can do:
> Another VERY big advertising company
> has forked Linux
has made Android
> and is paying huge salaries for keeping it entertaining enough
and is updating it
> just to offer them free to the individuals in order to collect their personal info.
so that mobile operators install it and Google slurps your data from it.
...lots of companies popped up with similar business models. They took over your computer and displayed adds when you were online. You got extra money for clicking on those ads.
Obviously people just installed it on some old box they had lying around and installed software to surf the web and click for them. So what will happen here is that most of the users will be bots.
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