There’s a saying that data is the new oil(new window) because of how valuable it is to the digital economy. But what’s the value of your data, personally? Depending where you live, information about you could be worth at least several hundred dollars a year to Facebook and Google alone.
For someone living in the United States, your data generated over $600 in revenue for just those two companies last year, according to our analysis of their regulatory filings. (We explain how we reached this number below.)
That doesn’t include the income you generate for other ad tech companies, data brokers, internet service providers, dark web marketplaces, and any number of other entities that leach profit out of your behaviors and attributes.
Getting people to attach a(ny) value to it is the biggest hurdle by far. I think the complacent attitude is part genuine incapacity in dealing with abstraction (what is a data profile anyway? How is knowledge of my purchase history a risk to me?) and part exceptionalism/denial. People like this tend never to think in terms of power dynamics.