When I was 8 using a Chromebook for the first time, I remember my elementary school teacher telling us not search up our own name because then the computer would “know” our name. Every few years when that memory pops back into my mind, it gets more absurd to think about as a belief that was held just a decade ago. For the past several months, Youtube is using AI to estimate a user’s age, and upon determining it to be under 18, requires government-issued ID or credit card information to allow them to continue viewing content on the platform. I have rightfully seen a lot of criticism of this threat to online privacy, but I still also see a portion of people willing to hand over this information, with no worry about the path it’s leading us down. As someone who would like to never hear the phrase “if you have nothing to hide…” ever again, I want to share some reasons for why I think there should be some serious regulations on data collected by major corporations.
It’s important to understand why your data is important as it’s hard to conceptualize how your data can even be used. There’s a lot of jokes about the FBI agent watching your Internet activity, and how it’s just a collection of random videos you watch and dumb questions you search. A series of ads run by Signal in 2021 shows just how narrowly an advertising company can segment you into a group, but even beyond tangible characteristics like your career and family, using this data to infer your values can make you even more susceptible to being manipulated by advertisements. There are so many different motivations behind people who want to disseminate and purchase your data, ranging from straight-up scammers to election manipulation but I wanted to focus on marketing with the purpose of making you spend more money.
Dynamic pricing has become a more commonly acknowledged term in the last few years, in which a company can constantly change the price of its product or service as demand and willingness on the consumer’s part to pay changes. Flights and accomodations are services that are accepted forms of dynamic pricing by most customers, called third-degree price discrimination, where time and location dictates changes in price. While there’s still criticism of third-degree price discrimination, especially as it bleeds into everyday purchases like groceries or ride-sharing, I also want to discuss the potential extreme future of first-degree price discrimination, where each individual customer is shown the exact maximum price they are willing to pay at any given moment. Imagine a scenario where you’ve just been informed that a loved one has passed away. You go online to search up information about organizing a funeral and setting up an obituary, and put a day in your calendar app for the funeral. When you go to book a plane ticket online, what are you willing to pay to get home before the day of the funeral? The gradual creep of privacy being stripped away can cause us to miss everything we are losing, but taking a step back makes us realize that things may be going too far.
Economically, an algorithm that is fed all of your private information can maximize supplier surplus like nothing else, and yet a world where customers can be nickel-and-dimed for every purchase they make doesn’t really feel like a world I want to live in. I’m sure almost everyone would agree with that, but I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope where as we accept the continued erosion of our privacy and its use in marketing, the more corporations try to push at the boundaries of what’s ethical. I hope that as platforms continue to demand private information that customers will continue to push back, and think very carefully before handing over that information.