Yeah, the bird use case is charming, but it's also a pretty good demonstration of how much information is sitting there waiting to be extracted from sensors that were installed for some completely different purpose.
> “Internal posts also reportedly pointed to AI agents making “large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute” and leading to a 40 percent increase in major technical and security incidents compared to the prior year. Employee time spent resolving those problems increased by as much as 70 percent. Meta declined to comment on these internal posts.”
This ignores the aspect of consumer data.
Credit issuers generate profit through issuing rewards programs in part due to the sale of their customer’s behavioral spending data. Cash and debit users largely retain their data privacy here.
It’s hard to put a real world number on what the cost to the consumer is for losing this data ownership, but it is not zero: these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices which extort additional margins from the consumer at a later date.
Is't the fact that data is valuable for somebody, does not mean that it has a cost (price) for me? Spending data is definitely valuable for seller / corporation to know what to produce. I, on the other hand, cannot get money by saving information.
It's not zero sum game, that either I have it or seller have value out of it. Just like with garbage - for me old broken furniture might be a garbage, while for other it's a burning fuel.
I think the OP is right in that spending data is valuable as a mechanism to figure out how extract more profit, which in the end will have customers paying that price.
However, it doesn't need to be exclusively negative. The data will both show where you can price gouge but also simply where demand is.
Put your coffee shop near a metro stop and sell sourdough bread and people will buy that because they want it isn't exactly negative.
I personally don't really see the problem. I'm not going to buy something I don't want/need. If they use the data to show me ads for something I want that then leads me to making a purchase, to me that seems like a win/win.
I'm generally a pretty frugal person, I have a good handle on my personal finances and I don't really buy much stuff at all. Maybe for someone else, shopping can be similar to an addiction where they see an ad and they know they shouldn't buy it but they can't resist. Women with a closet full of shoes come to mind. For those people I can see how this might be problematic but personally I largely ignore ads altogether. If I need a small thing I just go to the nearest store and buy the first best thing I find, if I'm making a more significant purchase I generally do some research and look at tests, user reviews etc. Sure there's some opportunity for manipulating me with fake/biased tests and reviews etc but I'm not really seeing how my spending info helps with that.
Imagine you walk up to a shelf and all the prices reconfigure based on a model of the most you would be willing to spend for each item, including putting fake "normal" prices so that the "sale" price you are shown is whatever percentage markdown makes you likely enough to buy.
There's no advertising here, there's just aggressively trying to drain each person's wallet as much as possible and seeing how far you can get before they change behaviour.
One example: my friend and I both requested rides using the same app, standing next to each other to the same street in the same neighborhood 3-4 miles away. He owns a car and rarely uses car services, I do not and it's my primary transportation. The quoted cost of his ride was half mine. It was shocking.
That's pretty unrealistic, but I'd visit occasionally just to browse and not buy anything, making the algorithm lower the prices for me. Could build an app where people could register their prices for stuff so everyone could see what the price floor is for a given product. Good luck making a system people won't abuse the shit out of.
And I'm sure there would be competitors simply not doing this where I could shop instead.
If Uber does this and you don't like it then don't use Uber. Regular taxis still exist and I'm sure they'd love to have your business back. Or you could get a car, low-end used EVs are quite affordable and fuel is almost literally free. They seem to hold good resale value too.
But something can be valuable to somebody without hurting you. For example if you participate in study as a member of control group. There is no impact to your life and huge benefit to whoever is producing the research. Similarly waste collection businesses take something that has no value to you and generate profit by modifying your waste into something valuable. That is to say - the fact that somebody gains value does not equate that you are loosing the same value.
In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average. You could argue that Google’s customers, like advertisers, propaganda firms, etc, all overpay for the data.
That seems unlikely, since I don’t see how many of them could be profitable if they were paying Google more than their own revenue.
> In the UK, google extracts one average lifetime retirement savings per person in revenue, on average.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
Why wouldn't a bank sell debit data just the same as credit data? For that matter, I would expect them to be selling everything they can: credit, debit, written checks, ACH transfers, etc.
What incentive is there for them to not do that? Laws? I'm asking sincerely, not rhetorically.
I think one factor missing in such discussions is that consumer data can be used for political means
And I don't mean "politicians can use it" - but instead, as corporations are more and more involved in the politics, you get targetted and directed based on their needs
It can also be weaponized. Israel uses these sorts of datasets to systematically murder the families and neighbors of their targets. The operation name is something like “Where’s daddy?” They use commercial datasets to figure out where the kids are, then wait for the parent (generally a civilian) to return home, then level the apartment block when it is most likely their are children and neighbors present.
Presumably, the same is being done in Ukraine and Russia too.
Yes, but typically only on the retailer/ Point of Sales side. Your bank is not selling that information. Of course, things get weird when you have additional intermediaries like Apple or Google pay.
In principle at least, there should be some measurable difference vs credit.
Would be very curious to see studies on this if anyone finds one!
Frankly, it’s everywhere— if a company is large enough, they will leverage consumer data to increase profits as much as the consumer will bear.
There are many other examples, but I’ll just link you this as a jumping off point if you want to go further:
https://epic.org/krogers-surveillance-pricing-harms-consumer...
With respect, not one of those links supports what you actually said:
> these data are increasingly used for targeted pricing practices
I personally think that “pricing” an insurance policy based on information obtained from data brokers shouldn’t be particularly controversial: individual pricing based on risk is exactly the point of insurance policies! Without personalized risk evaluation half of the insured population would heavily subsidize the other half, and you create serious adverse incentives.
The others are all about companies that seem to want to use this technique. And of course they want to. But several states either outlaw this outright or will do so soon. The Trump FTC has a draft rule which would prohibit it nationwide: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/...
This is such a toxic idea that I’m not particularly worried about it happening much in the real world.
The scale of wealth imbalance, the scale of money in politics, the scale of grocer prices,
the scale of data collection and abuse of targeted price manipulation,
the scale of climate catastrophe,
the scale of electric bills, humming noises, draught conditions.
It’s about realizing the scales are uneven, and seeing a tangible incarnation of that being built. All those problems are starting to seem awfully close to home.
You can’t reach the trillionaire, but maybe you can keep it out of your back yard, so you protest the data center.
Keep in mind line items can be deceptive. e.g. “Corporates” can mean “money we make from selling access to individual’s biometric data to the government.”
Yes, invasive background checks like this are scary. Biometrics collection becoming normalized as well.
I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
> I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
I should have clarified: They also require you to list deleted accounts.
> Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
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