How Much Is Your Data Worth? Explained: Fast Garden Assessment
If you’ve take the Fast Garden Assessment, you might have been surprised by the yearly value of your data. We’re neither policy experts nor market researchers but we set out to create the best personalized results available in today’s opaque data market given the data that is publicly available.
Here’s how we created the estimates. Sources are listed below.
To collect the types of data shared by companies we reviewed the 3rd party api documentation posted publicly on company sites. We grouped the types of data available into 5 categories:
Location:
- Latitude/Longitude
- Travel History
- Proximity
Personal:
- Age
- Education
- Address
- Phone
- Social security
- Passport
Social
- Likes/Dislikes
- Friends/Network
- Events
- Messages
Financial
- Bank Statements
- Purchase History
- Charges/Payments
Health
- Steps
- Heart Rate
- Fitness Activity
- Sleep
- Medical Records
If the company provides 3rd parties access to data in a category, either with or without your consent, we marked ‘true’ for that category.
The amount of money made by companies estimate required some creativity since most companies, especially today, are trying to keep this information away from the public. We compiled ARPU’s (Annual Revenue Per User) for companies who earn revenue either by selling data directly or by selling highly targeted advertisements. We relied on public company financial reports as well as articles estimating ARPU.
Breach estimates came from two sources. First, the awesome public api HIBP by security expert Troy Hunt which centralizes publicly released data breach information by email. By entering your email, the service returns the breaches you were impacted by and what types of information was compromised. Second, a literature review of public articles about large breaches. Similarly to the data sharing approach, we grouped the data compromised in breaches into 5 categories: Location, Personal, Social, Financial, Health.
The money made by hackers selling your breached data came from others’ research about the amount of money people make selling data on the dark web. These numbers are by far the least accurate of all our research, but we think the size of the data black market is fascinating and it’s important to be aware.
What’s Next is that as more information becomes available, we want to improve our assessment estimates and the industry’s transparency as a whole. We wanted to share how we created these estimates and our sources today, so we can open our work up to other suggestions and feedback. Please dig into the articles below and comment or make suggestions by sending us an email at info@fastgarden.io.
Sources:
3rd Party API Docs:
https://venmo.com/api/v5/public
ARPU Estimates:
Breach Records and Revenue Estimates:
https://corporate.target.com/article/2013/12/important-notice-unauthorized-access-to-payment-ca
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/under-armour-stock-falls-after-company-admits-data-breach.html
https://fortune.com/2018/09/07/equifax-data-breach-one-year-anniversary/
