If a merchant knows their customers better, they can charge them different prices: higher prices for their more loyal customers and their richer customers, lower prices to lure people in for the first time and for people who can't afford the higher price. Giving up your privacy in this case will only get you a better price if you're poor.

Perfect price discrimination transfers the entire surplus (-?) from consumers to producers, which is a good thing from the point of view of some economists, but in the real world it has some troubling centralizing effects.

Your blog isn't Unicode-transparent. "(-?)" was "(-$\epsilon$)", only in Unicode instead of TeX.

I was a bit upset with myself for not going to Ecomm. I didn't know much about the show so didn't go, but discovered that lots of really smart people went/presented so I thought I blew it. Plus it sounded easy, a show at an airport hotel - genius.

But I've been disappointed how little information was shared about the show. I found a site with slides at http://www.slideshare.net/eComm2008/slideshows - but only 4 of the 15 presenters I wanted to see/hear (from the program) were posted.

Then your blog might suggest that there really wasn't that much meat there. You state it was off topic, but your two examples - RFID in the fridge and location aware stuff isn't that exciting. For a show billed up as it was, I would expect your blog to be a bit more radical after 3 days of hearing the super smart speaking about the future of telecom.

I am planning on going to voicecon Orlando at the end of the month. I don't expect to hear much genius. It is more of a tactical show rather than strategic. But I suspect there will be lots of intriguing ideas that come up. I'll keep you posted on my blog and on Twitter.

"Mark my words, there will, before too long,
be some group that a government decides to
round up, using a social networking tool to
find them."

Maybe. However, I find it rather naive that
emphasising privacy can somehow stop this.
Either the government is justified in
"rounding up" folks or not. (I don't see a
problem "rounding up" serial killers, for
example. In many countries, people who have
robbed and beaten old people in the subway,
for example, have been convicted based on
the evidence of surveillance cameras.) If it
is justified, more power to them. If it is
NOT justified, then by definition it is doing
something wrong. Will such a morally wrong
government stop its wrongdoing just because
it can't get the data? In such cases, guilt
is secondary---see Guantanamo. What counts
is whether the requisite number of people have
been "rounded up", not whether they are really
guilty.

My point is, just like at Guantanamo, if a government
is morally wrong, it won't have any qualms about
breaking the law, "rounding up" completely innocent
people even if they have no connection to whatever
it is the government is battling.

The way to avoid this is transparency. By making information
by default public, and only in special cases private,
rather than vice-versa, society is helped and the government
is really under the control of the people.

Take Norway, for example. You can see, on the internet
and with no need for any sort of authorisation, what
everyone earns, how much tax they paid, how much wealth
they own etc. For a long time now Norway has topped the
lists---be it PISA (learning), Transparency International
(anti-corruption), Reporters Without Borders (freedom of
the press), UNESCO (quality of life for children), other
UN lists (general quality of life), Amnesty International
(human rights) etc etc. Coincidence? I don't thinks so.
(One's financial situation is not the only publicly
available information.)

The fact is that privacy is often used to conceal criminal
activity. Finally several countries are threatening
so-called "tax havens" with serious consequences if they
don't clean up their act. Their excuses are becoming
more and more lame (such as Switzerland saying "we prosecute
tax fraud; it's just that tax evasion is not a crime here"
is like saying "we prosecute premeditated murder, but killing
for fun is OK").

The whole privacy discussion reminds me of protests against
machine-readable passports a few years ago. One argument was
"If country X becomes a dictatorship, we can smuggle people out
with faked passports.". Like, yeah, right. Soldier at the border:
"This passport isn't machine-readable, so I can't tell if it is
faked or not. Thus, even though I suspect that what you are doing
is illegal, I have to let you pass." No. Such soldiers will shoot
you on the spot, as anyone with experience with a real dictatorship
would tell you if he weren't dead as a result of the shooting.
Again, the solution is to avoid a bad government, not try to keep
the government from acting due to exaggerated privacy. Not only does
this keep the government from acting in a good sense, but it is not
even effective if the government tries to act badly.

I have lived for at least a couple of years (sometimes much longer)
in 4 countries, spent a significant amount of time in a handful more,
and travelled to about 40 more. My experience: the less privacy
there is, the safer I feel.

You've undoubtably heard about the "study" where researchers found
that a majority of people on the street (Britain?) were willing to
give up their passwords for a bar of chocolate. I don't think the
passwords were verified for authenticity.

Most people don't seem to know, or don't care -- or both -- about the
full impact of intrusive technologies to their privacy. Hence the
success of supermarket tracking cards, etc. I think that even in
a largely technologically-aware area such as "Greater Silicon Valley,"
people are simply too busy trying to earn a living, get little Johnny
to softball practice and little Suzy to gymnastics, etc., to bother
with informing themselves on what are seen as abstract issues that have
little to no direct effect on their lives. And if they do hear about
these issues, they often don't understand them. Critical thinking,
sadly, seems on the decline.

Thus they jump on things like supermarket "loyalty" cards, which on the
surface seem like a good deal. Sites like www.nocards.org are lost in
the noise of the myriad of entertainment options. Yet I can verify
from personal experience that much of what they say is true. When one
supermarket chain was bought out by another a few years back, they crowed
about dropping the card program in favor of low prices, all the time, for
everybody. And it was true... for a while. But the bright lights in
sales and marketing couldn't restrain themselves, and eventually they
brought the cards back. I was on a tight budget then, and watched every
penny. And yes, the prices on featured items (card required) was quite
low. But prices on everything else went up significantly. I haven't
shopped there since, even though my financial situation has improved.

Oh, and what about the arson case involving someone who was discovered,
through a supermarket card program, to have bought lighter fluid? Or
the person whose liquor purchases, tracked by the store, were brought to
light when that person sued the store after slipping and falling? And
how about the DEA asking supermarkets for customers who have purchased
large amounts of plastic baggies, on the theory they might be drug dealers?
Note to the uninformed: these have all already happened!

And as further evidence of just how lame the "spoiled milk" application is...
Of course when I buy milk it is before the expiration date. But that date
often passes while I'm using the milk, and most of the time it lasts for
days or even weeks without a problem. In one extreme case, I opened a sealed
container of sour cream A FULL YEAR after the expiration date -- it was fine,
and I used the entire contents over the course of several weeks uneventfully.