In this recent article, a woman named Risa Puno set up a station in New York selling 700 cookies iced to resemble the logos of social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, instead of paying with real money, the catch here was that participants had to trade in personal information, such as your email address, your mother's maiden name, phone number, driver's license number, the last four digits of your Social Security Number, and even your fingerprints for these appealing cookies. After the day was over, Puno found that 380 New Yorkers participated in this event, with 162 of them giving up their Social Security Info, 117 trading in their fingerprints, and more than half posing for a photo. As part of the project, Puno refused to tell her customers what she was going to do with the data, and instead made the customers sign a document releasing their information to her and allowing them to be shared and displayed. Surprisingly, many people gave her more information than she asked for. Puno was baffled by how many Americans are not sure how much their personal data is worth. She observed that some participants did not even eat their cookies, and that they just wanted to take pictures of them. She reported: "They wanted to hold it against the sky with the bridge in the background." It's pretty interesting to see how social networks affect our perception of personal information, as some people gave those information up just for the sake of purchasing cookies that are iced with social media logos.
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