AT&T wants to know: how much would you pay for a little online privacy? [View all]
`What's one piece of your privacy worth? About a dollar a day, suggests telecom giant AT&T.
The company's latest internet service offering in Austin, Texas comes in two flavors.
The company might as well call them the "some privacy" and "no privacy" services.
The cheaper version gives customers a discount in return for being targeted more intrusively than ever by user-specific advertising.
This is a long article, well worth the read.
I was esp. struck by THIS:
On a per-app basis, wrote Scott Savage and Donald M Waldman, users were "willing to make a one-time payment for each app
of $2.28 to conceal their browser history,
$4.05 to conceal their list of contacts,
$1.19 to conceal their location,
$1.75 to conceal their phone's identification number,
and $3.58 to conceal the contents of their text messages.
The consumer is also willing to pay $2.12 to eliminate advertising".
And the more experienced a user was with the technology, the more he or she was willing to pay strongly suggesting that educated technology users don't like what's being done to them.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/13/at-t-austin-uverse-experiment-user-data