Did you know that your personal data has a strong economic value?
Tags: Privacy, Profiling, Personal Data Protection, Economics, Gdpr

What is the dictionary meaning of PROFILING:

“In marketing, the processing of data relating to one or more customers or users, in order to divide them into homogeneous groups based on tastes, interests and behaviours”

But let’s try to see more specifically what happens every time we publish something private online or every time we share our thoughts with a friend. All this information has a strong economic value and moreover it is our information.

As in any commercial exchange there are sellers, buyers and the products sold. Among the main buyers we can mention a few such as Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, Facebook ..

Who are the sellers?

WE ARE. However, we are too good (or perhaps too naive) and therefore we decide to give our information away without obtaining an economic return.

The types of data sold are mainly socio-demographic, interest, behavioural, location, opinion, shop visits, etc.

All this information that we give every day allows “buyers” to divide us into more or less homogeneous groups so that they can then bombard us with advertising messages in line with what we need or that we may even want.

A little bit of “data”

A count of the actual value is difficult to establish, but we can make a quick calculation, take for example the 2017 advertising revenues in the United States: $83 billion, let’s divide it now for internet users active in the USA : 287 million. The market value of a user will be around $289.19 per year. That same year I made exactly $0 from my own data.

If you want to find out the current value of your data, the Financial Times created a calculator based on the analysis of industry pricing data from a range of sources in US.

Recently I came across a post which particularly struck me because I found myself in a similar situation.

By Benedetta Fantauzzi

“Okay # I felt more spied today than usual.

I was in #train, intent on making my good talk.

I decide to scroll the #Instagram #homepage to pass #mytime.

All the advertising proposed among the various photos: perfectly coinciding with what I said just a few minutes before.

1) ok they have #profiled me with the #microphone;

2) I deactivate the #microphone;

3) I realize that in order to make #Instagram usable in one of its main functions, or to make #stories, the #microphone must be #active.

This is just one of many school cases.

The same situation can be seen in most of the #app we use. ”

Give up or find a compromise?

Why aren’t services like Instagram receiving payment for its services rendered?

We should always ask ourselves where these companies take their profit from. The answer is probably the following: from the data we share every day. So to be able to use a service we have to compromise and, most of the time, these compromises violate our privacy.

What does it mean?

Here is an example from an Italian newspaper (Il Corriere della Sera).

“If, for example, Tim (a telephone company) asks us for an identity document to activate the telephone line, we are obliged to say” I agree “to obtain the service. However, the telephone company cannot sell our name to Corriere della Sera to send us the promotion of the subscription to the newspaper. To do so, he must ask for it explicitly. We can say “yes” or “no”: it is called “express consent”.

We have come to no longer be able to keep this continuous flow of information, to which we are continuously expose, under control.

We can’t stop it, that is the reality, but we can control it. We at Just Me technologies are trying, are you?