It seems so stupid that I'm like a suspect for wanting an exchange of information without dropping my pants and bending over. No, I don't want cookies. Yes I want to read the article but no, I don't want to "sign up."

It makes me feel like being a f*cking hermit. But I prefer to pirate. Even though I'm not that good at it. Screw them. I got two private trackers, a VPN, and I hope that's enough.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 178 points 2 years ago (19 children)

It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.

The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don't have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it's reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user's data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.

These companies don't do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

That's including showing the ads. The data itself isn't worth that much unless people are viewing them.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

As far as I'm aware the valuation is just data brokering - ie, the people collecting data from apps and selling to advertisers.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Then I don't believe it, Google makes about 200B in advertising revenue a year, serving about a quarter of the internet ads.

Advertising online is not even a trillion dollar market, how can just the data be bigger? Maybe if you count it being sold resold ten times

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

I've finally run some actual numbers, after finding a source for the data brokerage industry value (much lower, $319 billion in 2021). The link to your instance's version is here: https://lemmy.world/post/10892972

TL;DR my conservative estimate is that every user is owed roughly $40 per year - but this doesn't include Google or other businesses who keep and exploit proprietary datasets, rather than selling the raw data.

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