What if people were paid for their data?

The value of my data is not that it can train a statistical model about preferences of developers in their 30s - that&#x27;s absolutely marginal. My personal data is useful in itself as a proxy for my own life, my preferences, my buying habits, it&#x27;s a map on how to influence and predict my behavior, possibly against my will.<p>A company having exclusive access to all my personal data, emails, etc. can for example, infer that I have an urgent need to buy an airline ticket to visit my sick father, and extract my reserve price for that ticket, as opposed to an average price for all passengers. Or it can deduce the minimal paycheck I am willing to accept for a job.<p>So even in the unlikely case I can recover the full value of my data from the market, I haven&#x27;t really earned anything. My information differential is a competitive advantage in the market, and selling it is self defeating, companies are <i>not</i> selling or giving their data back to me. So the more data you sell or give, the larger the asymmetry grows until the only deals you can make are bad deals.<p><i>Edit: I can neither confirm nor deny I am developer and&#x2F;or in my 30s</i>

I&#x27;ve had this idea in the bucket of &quot;crazy things I&#x27;ll never do&quot; which is similar to this, half art-piece, half serious:<p>- Users sign up to an ad network and they insert all information about themselves, the more, the better.<p>- They are periodically prompted to add or update their data (like facebook asking you if you&#x27;re still living in the same city).<p>- An adblock-like browser extension, replaces all ads they see with the own network&#x27;s ads, which are highly targeted, and hence get much more money than regular ads for the ad network.<p>- The ad network is setup as a non-profit foundation which pipes all the revenue into donations to institutions doing work related to privacy initiatives (EFF and similar).<p>- Users are shown how much money their willingful lack of privacy has generated for privacy initiatives.<p>It&#x27;s a play on using the argument of &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot; in order to advance actual privacy legislation and protections. If someone builds this, I&#x27;d sign up and use it.

I remember reading one of Bill Gates’ ideas to reduce spam. Charge a nominal fee for each e-mail sent, from memory, it was something like $0.000001 USD per e-mail.<p>It never took off, of course, but it’s important for us as a society to come up with better solutions than “Trust Zuck” or let company lawyers win with their horribly user-antagonistic end-user licence agreements (EULA).<p>As an aside, I find it fascinating how lawyers aren’t getting much of the blame in all of this debate around data. Who actually writes and&#x2F;or approves most of these policies? The legal eagles, that’s who.<p>Let’s at least debate the alternatives to the current adtech dominance of the most popular online platforms (Facebook, Google search, Android OS, Apple’s App Store ads, etc.).<p>edit: fixed spelling mistakes, added the ‘as an aside’ para.

Companies will argue, either rightly or wrongly, that people are already getting paid... Just not in cash. Google Maps is free for me to use, so long as I relinquish location data necessary for it to function, which Google can then use as they please to analyze what businesses I frequent, where I live, what type of transportation I use, etc.

I generally agree with Weyl and Posner&#x27;s position here in that we need to completely change people&#x27;s perspective on the value of their data and how easily they give it away. So I don&#x27;t want to distract from that point. However, I do want to also point out that data itself functions more like capital than it does like labour (although the act of providing data may be more similar to labour).<p>Capital is always the source of financial asymmetry between the labourers and the wealthy capital-owners. So instead of &quot;selling&quot; our data to companies for a fixed price, allowing them to exploit it forever, maybe we should be only renting companies the temporary right to use our data -- keeping the wealth asymmetry from growing.

In some ways we already are. For instance if I use my supermarket loyalty card, they let me save around 1-2% on my purchase in exchange for the better tracking they get.

If someone were to figure out the exact mechanics of this, then this could become universal basic income.<p>I have thought a lot about what trapped intangible value all of us have, such that ‘if’ there was a market for it, we could get paid. Our personal data, with opt-in volunteering, is certainly at the top of the list. The other potential personal markets that have very similar characteristics (to personal data), but don’t exist are:<p>1) Home equity: Americans have $6.2T in home equity that could be “sold”<p>2) Driving data: get paid for carrying free sensors so that one helps map the world, so we get to self driving sooner in more cities<p>3) Opinions: large scale polling for everything, from movie trailers to startup landing pages to new products&#x2F;ads — everything<p>4) Fact checking: crowd sourced journalism; often Reddit crowds figure out the truth&#x2F;source faster than pro journalists; there ought to be a market for “if I know something, Eg some insider info, I could improve on the state of public truth”<p>5) Goodwill: one of the most amazing things I stumbled upon was www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;borrow; people ask for money and strangers give money; I would never have predicted this to exist. I believe goodwill and benevolence is one of the largest untapped markets.<p>There are probably several other (and better) examples: point is that royaltiess&#x2F;annuities from such markets could be part of UBI in the future.

I&#x27;m already compensated for my data. I can use Facebook, read news websites, play games, and watch videos without taking out my credit card.<p>I have no other way to convert my data into dollars so this&#x27;ll have to do.

I had an evil idea once for a site where you got paid to supply information on other people. You create an account and narc on all your friends and family by telling the site what things they were interested in and what they have been talking about lately. The more money they make from targeted ads to that person, the more money you get paid :) Like I said, it is evil and no one should do it.

This article is thought-provoking, but the value of our data is far beyond training AI. Tech giants have been utilizing our data for ads targeting for such a long time. We, as data contributors, deserve to get our share of profits from the huge amount of money they made from using and selling our data.<p>I happen to find out this blockchain project, Measurable Data Token, which aims to create a decentralized data exchange ecosystem to reward users for sharing their data. Here is the link to their website (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdt.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdt.co&#x2F;</a>) if you guys want to check it out.

Without knowing how companies actually use my data, I can&#x27;t put a price tag on it myself.<p>That means I can only rely on the price put out by the companies that collect it, and if they collude to keep prices low, it doesn&#x27;t matter if they&#x27;re caught, because they already have the data.<p>I also don&#x27;t know the entire network that my data transits with the amount of money that gets paid for data -- Google could sell to some small company which sells to an international company, which sells to a shell company and ends the trail for most of us.<p>I suspect that internet and real celebrities will be paid orders of magnitude more for their data anyway.

There are a bunch of apps and websites that do this already. Google Play Rewards is probably the most reputable, but they&#x27;re easy to find and advertise themselves aggressively.

What worries me is that we are always surprised how our data can be used. You may agree on something you think you understand and indirectly agreed to something else.

The risk associated with my data being collected is likely not worth what anyone is willing to pay for it, and I assume this is true for nearly everyone.

Your data by itself is basically worthless. Your data combined with Google&#x27;s algorithms to extract meaning is worth all the services they provide.

Some companies are working on this sort of thing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.killi.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.killi.io&#x2F;</a>

They already are, essentially, in-kind—-with “free” software and services like gmail, fecebook, instaglam, etc etc

I don’t want money in exchange for my data. I just want genuine anonymity except where I say otherwise.

Sell my data? That&#x27;s ridiculous!<p>Leasing it for a defined period of time, that&#x27;s plausible.

this is a huge use case for blockchain. Just try Brave browser to see for yourself

How much is it worth and who will pay and how will I collect it.

people are paid for their data, they get to use social media.