Cafe in Providence, Rhode Island Serves Free Coffee To Students Who Provide Personal Data; Participants May Receive Info From Cafe's Corporate Sponsors (npr.org) 113
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: Shiru Cafe looks like a regular coffee shop. Inside, machines whir, baristas dispense caffeine and customers hammer away on laptops. But all of the customers are students, and there's a reason for that. At Shiru Cafe, no college ID means no caffeine. "We definitely have some people that walk in off the street that are a little confused and a little taken aback when we can't sell them any coffee," said Sarah Ferris, assistant manager at the Shiru Cafe branch in Providence, R.I., located near Brown University. Ferris will turn away customers if they're not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas. According to Shiru's website: "We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee." The source article additionally explores privacy aspects of the business. The cafe, which is owned by Japanese company Enrission, says it shares general, aggregate data such as student majors and expected graduation years.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas. According to Shiru's website: "We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee." The source article additionally explores privacy aspects of the business. The cafe, which is owned by Japanese company Enrission, says it shares general, aggregate data such as student majors and expected graduation years.
in b4 all the negative posters (Score:1)
Free Up moderation (Score:3)
Just send me all your personal data, social security number and dog's name and I will up moderate your next slashdot comment for free!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just send me all your personal data, social security number and dog's name and I will up moderate your next slashdot comment for free!
I will provide you as accurate information as I do anywhere they ask for data about me:
Ronald Roosevelt Clinton. 46-3825-633. And my dog's name is spot.
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As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
What is the level of understanding, though? Knowing the mechanics doesn't necessarily imply understanding the impact or risks.
Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable. Much like selling yourself into indenture is illegal, selling and buying personal information needs strong regulation too, like in the EU and other European countries.
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Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable.
This almost sounds like a setup to expose how much your personal data is really worth. Even if its not, escaping into the real world might help people realize the value of their information. Of course, it could cause the real world to go "free" as well where everything is free in exchange for your soul.
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Except I bet they don't sign an agreement to what they can and cannot do with the information they collect.
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As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
If I give them false data am I really paying with my privacy.
Where I can get away with it- I always lie when people are trying to collect information from me. I have so many fake names with so many different stores and websites I probably wouldn't recognize them all.
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I'm guessing a false student ID is more expensive than just paying for coffee
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As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
I'm pretty sure the value of one's personal info far exceeds any amount of "free" coffee in the long run, especially as students will eventually graduate and, then, be denied more coffee, while some (most?) of their personal info remains useful. This is one case where a fake ID would really come in handy ...
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I'm pretty sure the value of one's personal info far exceeds any amount of "free" coffee in the long run
Overall I doubt it. I think that the bubble of personal information buying and selling will burst one day. Organisations collect it and sell it on to others who sell it on at a profit (repeat and rinse) to suckers at the top of a pyramid who kid themselves it was worth the price. Really? I believe it is a fad that will pass. Anyway, have you seen the price of coffee in these places lately?
This is one case where a fake ID would really come in handy ...
I'm using fake IDs and misinformation all the time. I'm sure I could get free coffee in exchange for BS at that pla
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Just curious, I thought I'd heard that possessing a "false or fake ID" was illegal...if not on a federal level, maybe it is only some states' levels?
I'm just curious if this is true....
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But how can they PROVE that my name isn't Seymour Butts, living at 123 Howe Now street in Brown Cow, MN?
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I thought I'd heard that possessing a "false or fake ID" was illegal....
I'm in the UK. We don't carry ID, and I'm sure I'm not going to be prosecuted for telling a coffee shop I'm Joe Smith instead of Nukenerd.
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Obtaining a thing of value (product or service) by intentionally providing false information would be Fraudulent misrepresentation. Claiming you'd forgotten your own name might reduce it to Negligent misrepresentation.
Misrepresentation Act 1967 [legislation.gov.uk]
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Just curious, I thought I'd heard that possessing a "false or fake ID" was illegal...if not on a federal level, maybe it is only some states' levels?
I'm just curious if this is true....
Don't know about the other poster, but I meant a fake student ID ... at least at this stupid cafe. Turning away non-student/faculty (potential) customers who would pay actual money seems dumb.
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If you're using a fake ID to commit fraud, even minor fraud such as getting a coffee, it is still fraud.
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I'd assume that it is using it fraudulently that is illegal. Quickly DDGing seems to agree that it is using fake ID that is illegal, but I'm not a lawyer.
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But do the students understand that they are paying way over market value for those few dozen liters of coffee each week?
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It might even be slightly beneficial - it's teaching the students that their personal information has value. They might be less inclined to just hand it over for free or near-free to anyone who asks.
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I am amazed that your personal info is worth that much money. Let's say 200 cups of coffee a year at the normally overpriced rate of $5 and that's $1000. If my personal info is worth that much then I should be getting all this free stuff. Why am I paying for an ISP when these advertisers could be totally subsidizing it? Why pay for streaming TV when they could be making it free or even providing kickbacks?
Problem is, the personal info is not inherently worth that much. I think we're in another dot-com e
Stopped reading (Score:2, Funny)
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By having absolutely no sense of self worth, and also being stupid enough to think that coffee is expensive.
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I stopped reading at "free". What are we getting for free?
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I didn't read at all. A friend said I could get free stuff. Where do I sign up?
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I grind my own coffee, and at $11.99 / pound for excellent beans the 15 grams I need for a mug of coffee cost me $0.39. I sometimes buy fairly good (but not super-premium) beans at $4.99 a pound, which means a cup of what you'd get at a typical coffee shop sets me back sixteen cents.
That's good, because I drink a *lot* of coffee.
Recently I discovered a programmable tea urn at the local Asian market that'll keep up to 5 liters of water at just the right temperature for for aeropress, which takes about 100
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To me, it is all just hot, bitter brown liquid.....
Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Is there that much of a difference you can really discern between mos
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Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Absolutely, but it is certainly easy to obliterate the differences between expensive beans and cheap beans by mishandling them.
It sounds like the coffee you drink is overextracted. Overextraction is common because it's what you get when you economize by using too little coffee and making up for that by brewing too long. The acid flavors extract first, then the sweet ones, then finally the bitter ones. By overextracting dark beans, which are naturally more bitter, you can produce a potent-tasting (althou
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It isn't just a matter of finer grind == more flavor. The optimum grind for flavor depends on the brew method, because each brew method exposes the grounds to different temperature water for different amounts of time. For espresso you want a very fine grind that would be too bitter if you used it in a drip machine, because it has to extract extremely quickly. For cold brew you want super coarse because the coffee will be steeping in cold water for sixteen or eighteen hours.
I find my preference for grind
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Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Do you also think there's only 2 kinds of Wine, red and white?
Coffee tastes vary very wildly. Not even from different beans, or different roasts of the same bean, but even the same roast, same bean brewed on a different date with huge swings within 2 weeks of roasting, .... and then it goes stale.
Assuming you're making the perfect coffee, you probably have stale beans. Think about 2 weeks next time you see a "best before" date on the package that has a different year as the year you bought it. That's withou
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To be honest, I really don't need to grind my own beans. The reason to grind your own is that the coffee goes stale more slowly when it is un-ground, but a pound of coffee disappears practically overnight in my house.
Since about half of what I drink costs $5/lb, I don't know if I qualify as a coffee snob. I think of myself more as a coffee hacker.
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Do you have any additional cost for filters etc?
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Not really. For aeropress I use metal filters, which produce a slightly oilier results than paper, which I still occasionally use when the mood hits me. That cost is negligible. For pourover, I use a paper filter which adds about a nickle to the cost; but for french press no disposables are needed. I also occasionally do cold brew in the french press, although other people prefer a reusable coffee sock.
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Thanks for all the information!
Not free coffee (Score:2)
Read the sentence until the end, it's not free coffee.
"Free Coffee To Students Who Provide Personal Data"
That's not free.
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The western world is sort of appalled at only serving one set of people.
Isn't this discrimination?
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I don't know if it's anymore discriminatory than Costco selling only to Costco members.
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When anyone can become a college student for $35 a year, we'll talk. :-)
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Is cost what determines if something is discriminatory?
Can I rent a dorm room at a public college campus without being a student?
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No, but it is one fairly straightforward way to prove discrimination. Minorities statistically make less money on average than people in the majority (whatever that might mean in a given region of the world). Therefore, anything that costs a lot of money will probably be rarer among minorities, statistically. Therefore, one might reasonably argue that tying an otherwise unrelated service to such an expensive thing (in this case, being in college) is
Data mining for fun and profit (Score:2)
It works fine for bookface and Alphabet. The coffee shop can probably re-sell the data repeatedly.
I would go with using the socially available information for someone else. I mean free coffee is worth that much effort on my part.
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Fake information is worth fake coffee.
I hope you like decaf!
And, there are college students... (Score:2)
... dumb/desperate enough to voluntarily do this.
Ivy League college students.
We're doomed.
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I agree but I'd rather have a warm cup of coffee over a caffeine pill any day. Heck, I'd probably use a cup of coffee to help swallow that pill like I do for my other meds.
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Circa 1997 Random House had an online gaming section where you could answer personal questions about yourself in exchange for 'free' credits to play games on their site. Nineteen Ninety Seven -- they had FB's business model in mind, just shit execution.
~2000/2001 When I was in college some credit card company (Cap one I believe) showed up outside the dorms with 'free' pizza to any student who'd sign up for a credit card - which i'm sure had less than .. competitive rates/terms/fees. The line was probably
May as well (Score:2)
Poisoned well .... (Score:2)
I would gladly exchange some slightly poisoned personal info for some free coffee. :)
(Profit!)
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The coffee is also poisoned.
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The coffee is also poisoned.
At the rate this world is going, I'm failing to see the downsides involved here.
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Just ask yours without milk...
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The coffee is also poisoned.
That's bad
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The coffee is also poisoned.
That's bad
But it comes with a free frogurt!
Is there an "advertising bubble" going on? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't help but imagine that there is some kind of "advertising bubble" like a stock bubble, that is going on here. Is advertising *really* that valuable? I see ads, and they influence my purchases, and that is money to be made. (Well, shifted, since no new good was created.) So if they know my birth date and favorite color, they can target ads to me better. But how much better does that influence my purchases compared to the original ad they showed me? How much more money is there to be made from the more targeted ad? Is it worth a cent? A dollar? Ten dollars? Do advertisers really pay real dollars for that? Will companies really pay more for those targeted ads? Do they really really turn into profits somewhere?
I wonder if advertisers are using the concept of "targeted" ads to jack up advertising prices to the point where the ROI is not sustainable. I am hoping that it will turn out that targeted ads are not much better than regular ads, and there is a market "crash" that happens, and suddenly personal data becomes worthless.
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Perhaps there is a wider market for well fed predictive models on people that goes beyond the advertising domain...
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Please elaborate.
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A trained barista peddling targeted propaganda about a company to a student likely to be seeking employment in the industry soon could have a lot of value.
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I can't help but imagine that there is some kind of "advertising bubble" like a stock bubble, that is going on here.
Agreed. I also used the term "bubble" in a post further up, before I saw your post. I also used the term "pyramid" because I believe this data is being bought and sold with profit at every stage until a sucker at top has payed far more than it is worth - a pyramid (Ponzi in the US?) scheme. That is why we are assured the data collection industry is "worth billions", but only to the guys who sell the data onwards and that is not the value of addition sales.
I rarely see ads that seem to be targeted, and thos
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A Ponzi Scheme is something entirely different. It involves borrowing money, and paying that off with borrowed money, until you are long gone and too in debt for anyone to reclaim any of it.
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The value is not in showing you an ad that's more likely to influence you, but rather in not spending money to show you an ad for a product that you would never buy anyway.
G'kar (Score:1)
"Weep for the future Na'Toth. Weep for us all."
Ad Buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
that is all.
Sure (Score:2)
Name (fine)
Phone number (work)
Email (throwaway I use for orders)
Major (sure)
DOB (sure, year is correct, but month and day are made up)
You ask me for data, I'll give it to you. It may not be accurate, is all. Because you have given me no incentive to provide accurate data, and I don't trust you. After all, this is about coffee, not something important. You get what you could have looked up anyway.
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Name (fine)
Phone number (work)
Email (throwaway I use for orders)
Major (sure)
DOB (sure, year is correct, but month and day are made up)
You ask me for data, I'll give it to you. It may not be accurate, is all. Because you have given me no incentive to provide accurate data, and I don't trust you. After all, this is about coffee, not something important. You get what you could have looked up anyway.
You'd give more free information than me. No way I'd give my name with any other piece of information that is correct. If the name is correct the rest of it won't be.
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I give my nemesis' name and work number
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I give my nemesis' name and work number
That works even better! Now all I need is a nemesis.
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I'll give you my list :)
Go enjoy your free coffee.
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Name (fine)
Phone number (work)
Email (throwaway I use for orders)
Major (sure)
DOB (sure, year is correct, but month and day are made up)
You ask me for data, I'll give it to you.
You are an adman's delight. My version is :-
Name (false but plausible)
Phone number (a certain pub I dislike)
Email (that of a spammer I found out)
Major (false)
DOB (false but plausible)
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Brown...
Coffee...
Bullshit...
Do you see the pattern, here?
This is obviously financed by UPS.
Release employees info online (Score:1)
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That's only fair if they take the free coffee.
It's interesting but not surprising how they let the teacher's opt out.
Re:Friends place for coffee (Score:1)
These are future leaders? Scary (Score:2)
Since these Ivy Leaguers may be involved in writing some kind of privacy policies or legislation that gets imposed upon the rest of us.
Sounds like a social experiment (Score:1)
...to see just how little society values its data.
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Minorities are less likely to attend college, so there might be something there, in theory. That said, in practice, the sorts of people who hang around in coffee shops all day tend to be hipsters, and I'm pretty sure that's not a protected class.
Café? (Score:2)
"To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. "
Concentrations? Well, instead of Café, they should have named it 'Camp' and perhaps offer a free id tattoo?
But now since we have Godwin out of the way, does that mean they have their data for life and the students get coffee for life?
Something smells...and it's not the coffee (Score:2)
So they say they release aggregate data...but they are collecting phone numbers.
If you're their customer.... (Score:3)
....please don't ever, ever bitch about your personal information being used commercially.
So it's pro-globalism ... (Score:2)
... since America is sharing the Dream with Japan.
So, fuck you very much mr president.
A very old proverb comes to mind (Score:2)
" Beware of Greeks bearing gifts "
Brown Students are idiots giving away PII info (Score:1)
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Content delivery (Score:1)
By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas.
I'd like to imagine someone trying to go in there and telling them their interests are only "porn" and "prostitutes."