People I talk with about my resistance to cloud-centric, consumer-like computing have a hard time understanding my reticence. Many, in learning of my choices tend to cast them as an indictment of their own. This discomfort with pluralism of approach is a problem too big to address here, now, but suffice it to say it tends to play out as defensiveness: I'm challenged on my choices, they start defending their own choices, or both.
Some of the more thoughtful people I've talked to will rationalize their participation by an appeal to a market model: When we use a free-of-charge cloud service, or the built-in spyware that came with our devices, in this conception we are, essentially, trading away some of our privacy in exchange for the service we're being provided.
One of the big holes I find with that analysis, though, is that there are huge informational asymmetries at work in the barter-like economy proposed by this model.
This looks a little bit like the agency problem: How do we know that those to whom we delegate responsibility for handling our data, and provisioning services that are used to gather it, are doing so on our behalf, rather than for their own interests? One way is to make the interests of all the parties clear, and to try to address explicitly those places where the agent's interests apparently conflict with our own. But are cloud providers your agents? Are you their customer?
Making explicit the interests involved is a form of information exchange. Under the efficient market hypothesis, the price mechanism is essential to analyzing how we live our lives because it economizes away the need to exchange very much information. A buyer need not know where the raw materials that went into a product were sourced, that's the producer's concern. Rather, the buyer, in this conception of the world, need only know that the product meets their functional requirements and that the price is right. If the price is right, then buy. If not, then not. Simple.
Of course, it's not so simple as that. We recognize externalities exist, and that there are other criteria involved in a purchase decision, especially in a long-running relationship through which the good or service supplied is to be supplied in quantity over time. Can I continue to buy at this price, in the quantity and quality I need? Are there other providers who offer these services, so that I can comparison shop?
Oddly, moving as we do in a world where the exchange of vast quantities of information quickly has become the norm, pricing the provision of information services has become increasingly opaque. When one "pays" for an email service in exchange for one's privacy, who, there, has accurate pricing information? Who has better information about what your personal information is worth, you, or Google? If you think you know the answer to this question better than Google, I want to have a long, extended talk with you: Your ideas intrigue me and I might be interested in subscribing to your newsletter.
All of this, so far, works within a two-party model, as if we're the customers of cloud providers. This is straightforward enough when the freemium model is at work. But, in the freemium model, the free-of-charge level isn't necessarily being "paid" for with the coin of access to personal information. Rather, the no-charge service levels are, essentially, loss leaders, something that can be written off as a marketing cost. Here, we don't have to guess: The comparison with the paid service levels provides a at least some quantitative indicator from which to extrapolate what the loss leader is costing the provider and what they're worth to the customer.
The real question about the value of personal information arises when operating well away from the freemium model. The two-party model breaks down when the personal information harvested contributes significant value to the provider. Maybe there are freemium and paid levels, but in this case they're ancillary: The user isn't necessarily, or at least isn't exclusively the customer. This is why I call this "consumer-like" computing. The provider has other customers, and the transaction between the vendor and its other customers isn't denominated in such squishy terms: It's denominated in cash money. That translates directly into paychecks for the the provider's employees, yield for their lenders (if any) and equity or dividends for its owners.
In aggregate, we don't have to guess how much our privacy is worth: We can see it in their stock price.
And what do you know? To look at the market capitalization of companies that trade in access to our data, our privacy turns out to be worth quite a lot.