Meet the Minnesota family that turned a soda machine company into a surveillance empire
▻https://thehustle.co/three-square-market-vending-machine-microchip
If Westby’s success proves anything, it’s that that digital surveillance technology is now so cheap — and so unregulated — that almost anyone can sell it.
A ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme for the age of big data
Westby’s strategy for selling sodas to inmates and selling tracking systems to parents were strikingly similar: Find a niche market and pump it with marked-up wholesale products for a huge profit.
The market for surveillance technology meets every precondition for a Grade-A get-rich-quick scheme: Cheap inventory, little regulation, and high demand.
First, surveillance tech is surprisingly cheap. According to the Yale Law Journal, the cost of location tracking dropped from $105/hour to $0.36/hour when the portable GPS was invented, and then fell to to $0.04/hour at most when smartphone GPS became roughly equivalent to professional receivers.
Westby’s family business may be profit-forward, but it’s not malevolent (anyone who’s heard Patrick McMullan talk about healthcare and snow plows will tell you that). But customers deserve to know who is handling their data goes once it is collected.
Once an app collects consumer data, nothing prevents it from sharing with subsidiaries, parent companies, or partners.
When those partners are hidden — for instance, a quiz app that secretly collects data for a Russian political network or a childcare app operated by a for-profit prison company — consumers don’t know when they’re at risk.
And, when the companies that make and sell surveillance apps aren’t regulated, it’s even harder to ensure that the tech is used responsibly.
If we’re lucky, the future could have great snow plows. But in this new world, don’t expect control over your data and definitely don’t expect everyone who sells it to be as well-intentioned as Todd, Patrick, and Coach Danna.