Econintersect: Frederico Zanner is selling his private, personal information. You can buy various levels of Zanner’s personal information through his Kickstarter campaign, which has a goal of $500. With eight days remaining he has 168 backers who have pledged $2,014. What exactly is he selling? Watch his video (after the Read more >> jump) and read more detail.
[View video after the Read more >> jump.]
Federico is selling information that corporations are using for free to improve their marketing to target him specifically. These items include:
- Records of every place he goes on the internet;
- Everything he posts on the internet;
- Every mouse movement across every web page;
- Every physical movement between locations in the physical world;
- Hundreds or thousands (depending on level of purchase) of screen shots;
- Hundreds or thousands of webcam pictures;
- Thousands of lines of application logs; and
- A suite of application tools.
Data is available by the day, week or month.
An example of the data in the Zanner package is a second-by-second GPS tracking of his location, shown in the display picture below.
Zanner says if corporations are spending money to collect this data on him but not paying him anything, perhaps he can collect and sell the information. That way the corporations may reduce their overall data mining expenses and Zanner can increase his personal income.
How did Zanner come upon this idea? He tracked his personal activity as part of his thesis research at NYU (New York University) where he is a graduate student. From there he simply asked questions about commercialization potential.
Sound like a win-win?
Econintersect is reminded of a similar story that sounded to the participant like a win-win situation. The person in that story was named Faust.
Maybe the old saw about mouths of gift horses should be reconsidered in some cases.
Sources:
- A bite of Me (Frederico Zanner, Kickstarter, 27 May 2013)
- Personal data for sale (Flowing Data, 27 May 2013)
