Re: Pandora sends user GPS, sex, birthdate, other data to ad servers

* Jules Polonetsky wrote:
>Not justifying, just always surprised when the existence of an entire
>well publicized industry sector is news!

If you know "There are X that do Y" and then learn "Z does Y" where Z is
a member of X, is that news? Well, often it is. You know there there are
people who marry other people, but you would not infer from news about
someone specific marrying some other specific person that "marriage" is
a new concept people are unaware of -- that "marriage" "is news".

To look at it from a different angle, the story was about "Pandora's
Android app". If I thought the "app" did X while it really does Y, then
the "app" doing Y would be a "surprise" to me.

With "privacy", in the extreme we have people who think they can do what
they want without limits, and people who think nothing can be done with-
out their knowledge and explicit consent. In practise thoughts are a bit
more moderate, but not much. So when I look at "privacy", "surprise" is
normal and expected.

With respect to news and surprise, a rule of thumb I use is the degree
to which something is normal, expected, regarded as consensus, and does
not require thought or action on "my" part. Logging IP addresses for a
short while for debugging would fall into that category, but many other
things that may (or not) be common in the industry you mention are not.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Saturday, 16 April 2011 00:04:57 UTC