Is there anything intrinsically privacy hostile about this potential industry, beyond sending data to a server - which is something you might do if you engage with doctors or therapists virtually?
I hope that consumers choose to pay a premium for privacy preserving services. If users are indeed getting alot of value from the arrangement - I would hope they don't use free or cheap services that need data harvesting as part of the revenue.
My concern is that even premium products would want to pool user interaction logs in order to train better models - which isn't as directly hostile as packaging user labeled data and selling it, but it is a sloppy art to claim you are anonomyizing user data. As any sufficient anonymization necessarily destroys information that would be useful to training.
> Is there anything intrinsically privacy hostile about this potential industry, beyond sending data to a server - which is something you might do if you engage with doctors or therapists virtually?
Presumably people share things with their romantic partners that they don't share with doctors and therapists (assuming they aren't dating one). People shouldn't be using virtual doctors or therapists for the same reasons though. Everything they reveal about themselves will be collected, analyzed, stored forever, leaked/sold, and ultimately used against them at every opportunity.
It's also basically a myth that only free or cheap services abuse your data. Paid services and extremely expensive products do it all the time too. There is no company that wouldn't make a greater profit by taking your money and then also abusing your data so they pretty much all do it. The only services you can really trust are the ones you can run locally that don't send your data anywhere.
But the problem is how can consumers really know if the company is selling this data and to who, without some kind of legislation? Being a premium product is just an indicator, but it's not definitive.
I think even CCPA in California should be able to prevent abuses like that. At least you should know what data is being sold and you should be able to opt-out. If that's really the case, only time will tell.
I hope that consumers choose to pay a premium for privacy preserving services. If users are indeed getting alot of value from the arrangement - I would hope they don't use free or cheap services that need data harvesting as part of the revenue.
My concern is that even premium products would want to pool user interaction logs in order to train better models - which isn't as directly hostile as packaging user labeled data and selling it, but it is a sloppy art to claim you are anonomyizing user data. As any sufficient anonymization necessarily destroys information that would be useful to training.