How much is your data worth, and why haven’t you got paid?
Where’s my money?
The value of big data and amounts of money that come with it have been a hot topic since social media companies made their valuations common knowledge. In 2012, open-source analytics community Wikibon’s forecast pegged the big data market at $50 billion by 2017. And now, predictions are betting it could shoot to $103B in 2027.
Most people are wonder where this money for data exchange is happening. Is there a secret society you need to get in to get a piece of this pie? After all, each person who uses social media, does Google searches, and has applications on their phone is contributing to all the data being peddled.
Intangible as data is, every single person produces different kinds of information continuously and infinitely, which means that data is a valuable resource that will never run out. And until internet users figure out how to be appropriately compensated for their contributions, they are continuously making somebody else rich.
How much is your data worth?
Hard as it may be to believe, Mark Zuckerberg was likely telling the truth when he said that they [Facebook] “do not sell data to advertisers.” Despite what Facebook makes, the valuation of individual user data is quite low because what they’re selling is the aggregate data — the insights resulting from the bulk of information from different demographics.
“We can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser,” Zuckerberg said.
Of course Facebook doesn’t allow the data to change hands, if they did, then they lose their leverage. So they milk it and will continue to do so for as long as possible. What they give their advertisers and partners are just the analytics. The raw data remains safe in their vaults; this way, the data is preserved and made profitable for much longer than receiving a one-time payment from those who want it allows for.
Commenting on this, a reporter for Fast Company wrote: “Zuckerberg saying Facebook doesn’t sell data is like an energy company claiming it doesn’t sell coal. The individual words may be true, but the sentence is obscuring a greater truth.”
Given the way Facebook’s business model works — and based on obvious conclusions from Zuckerberg’s explanation — the value of user data is far beyond the one-year estimate since the data is usable by their clients for many years to come. The data will continue to be valuable for analytic use as long as the user is alive and active — and maybe even after a user dies.
Where do you sign up, or sign out?
Blockchain technology has been poised as the primary candidate for fixing the “broken Internet.” Data ownership and tracking can easily be managed. But to bridge the gap between cataloging data and assessing monetary value, blockchain technology needs some reinforcement — artificial intelligence.
We previously talked about the taxonomy of data, a vital first step that enables individuals to benefit from the data economy; the data economy that they have been involuntary, uncompensated participants in for quite some time now. DACONOMY’s use of superior AI engines to classify, assess, and appraise information gives users a clear-cut monetary valuation of any data; this allows consumers to decide for themselves whether they want to sell their data or not. In the new decentralized data economy, individuals — not third-party corporations, make money directly off of the data they generate.
When internet companies like Google and Facebook offered their services for free, it was never discussed that “free” was a relative term that came with side effects.
The trade-off was that in exchange for free access, your data was being mined, analyzed, and the resulting insights of the aggregate sold to advertising firms.
According to Quartz, average users earned somewhere between $3.86 to $41.65 for Facebook in 2015. Having risen to 2.23 billion active users — who generate more and more data by the second, Facebook earns over $1 billion per quarter in advertising revenues. Given these numbers, it’s not very likely they’ll want to spread the revenue around, and much less likely that they let users opt out of the hundred billion dollar revenue scheme.
The option to pay a monthly fee to opt out of data mining was never given and will probably never be offered by the platforms we use. If it ever were, some may choose to pay the fees. But then there’s the question of trust; what guarantee do users have that their data will no longer be collected, stored, and sold if they did pay the fees? Because if there’s no guarantee, then there is no promise that you aren’t getting duped into paying for the same invasion of privacy that everyone else is getting for free.
