I Sold My Data to the Devil and Only Got 65 Cents

“Think back on every fear, every hope, every desire you’ve confessed to Google’s search box and then ask yourself: Is there any entity you’ve trusted more with your secrets? Does anybody know you better than Google?” In his book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, author and public speaker Scott Galloway sheds light on how much faith we put in our tech giants. However, this faith is blind and can lead us to underestimate the quantity and cost of the personal information we share. In exchange for convenient products like Google Maps, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat, we’ve willingly shared highly personal information with companies to ensure that we continue receiving their services for free. But how much is our data worth? What’s the going rate for personal privacy? Financial Times developed a calculator that determines how much money you could theoretically get from advertisers if you sold your personal data. General information about a person’s demographics is worth next to nothing—50 cents could buy information on a thousand people. Certain factors can make you more valuable to potential businesses: if you’re interested in foreign travel, your data’s worth increases by a meagre three cents, while disclosing health issues will get you another nickel or two. Typically, the average person’s data sells for less than a dollar. Is it just me, or do you feel you’re getting ripped off? Personal information has become a new type of currency. Unfortunately, it’s one that has a very bad exchange rate. However, the problem may not necessarily be the price at which we are giving away our data but, rather, the quantity. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is estimated to have affected upwards of 80 million people, users were curious to see what personal information Facebook and Google had and began downloading their own data. When I downloaded my Facebook data, I had 3.2 GB— believe it or not, a file that big is equivalent to roughly 34,000 Word documents. Yikes! This amount is miniscule compared to the quantity of data Google has— given its storage of our search history, emails, YouTube videos, and more, it is estimated that the information they have on an average person could fill millions of Word documents. For the majority of people, sharing this much personal information may sound unsettling, but we do it anyway. This is called the “privacy paradox”: the well-documented tendency for people to engage in privacy-compromising behavior, despite also claiming to highly value their privacy. According to a Pew Research poll, 74 per cent of Americans view the right to control who can access their personal data as very important. Yet, we regularly give up our rights to privacy without so much as a second thought. A 2017 Deloitte study found that 97 per cent of people ages 18-34 agree to the terms and conditions without even reading them. In one hilarious study conducted by York University, researchers created Name Drop, a fake social media site with a catch. A whopping 98 per cent of participants agreed to Name Drop’s terms and conditions all while missing one very important clause: to use the platform, users must give away their first born child as payment. While this is a rather ridiculous example, most of us skim the service terms because reading them would be too labour-intensive. If you read the privacy policy of every website you visited, you would have to dedicate 25 days a year to the task. Even reading just one service agreement is time-consuming: consumer advocacy group Choice hired an actor to read aloud the terms for the Amazon Kindle and it took him nine hours. If you are worried about accidently relinquishing the rights to your un- born child and don’t have a free month to spare, you can visit the site tosdr.org (Terms of Service; Didn’t Read) for the SparkNotes version. Despite some discomfort, we’ve reluctantly accepted the terms and conditions and continue to use the practical and free (in some sense) tools provided to us by tech giants. However, our increasing ambivalence towards personal privacy has large and terrifying societal implications. You may not have anything to hide, but we must safeguard our right to privacy in order to protect vulnerable groups like human rights activists under repressive regimes or corporate whistleblowers. There is no easy or obvious solution to this problem. We’ve created entirely new business models centered around acquisition and sale of personal data. Our legislators are painfully behind: at Facebook’s Congressional hearing, a senator asked how one can sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for the service. Zuckerberg responded, “Senator, we run ads.” For now, as we wait for lawmakers to catch up, we should take ownership of our internet privacy and pray that when companies like Google say they will “do no evil”, they’re telling the truth.

by Taylor Ball