PAYING WITH DATA:How Free Services on the Internet

Are Not Free

Introductions

Web Ecology studies the relationship of the nature of

data and the behavior of actors on the internet.

Core Questions‣ What is the current state of the data

relationship between users and internet companies?

‣ What models or frameworks might influence the way users think about that relationship?

‣ How might those frameworks affect the way users share their data and interact with companies?

Context

Scale of the Data Relationship

500 million active users

175 million registered users

42+ products Chrome, Gmail

90 pieces of content created each month by average user

95 million tweets per day

11.1 billion searches in January 2011 in the US

Race to the Bottom: Free Services Economics

‣ Storage

‣ Bandwidth

‣ Processing Power

Focus has been...

‣ Data privacy

‣ Data ownership

‣ Data portability

...Emerging Conversation

‣ World Economic Forum: “Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class”

‣ Frog Design: Terms and Conditions blog

‣ Jaron Lanier: “We should pay for search.”

‣ Personal data panels @ SXSW

‣ “But as we use the Internet for “free,” we have to remember that if we’re not paying for something, we’re not the customer. We are in fact the product being sold — or, more specifically, our data is.”

- Metafilter commenter

Text

Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class

#payingwithdata

Sara Marie Watson

JuliaAngwin

Sam Yagan

Arvind Narayanan

@smwat @JuliaAngwin @random_walker

@WebEcology @WhatTheyKnow @okcupid @DoNotTrack

saramariewatson.com juliaangwin.com randomwalker.info

webecologyproject.org wsj.com/whattheyknow okcupid.com 33bits.org