If you use the internet or engage in any kind of transaction that a normal human would engage in, then your personal data is often being monetized without any compensation to you.

Here are some ways:

• Companies and advertisers collect your personal data (e.g your browsing and purchase history)
• Companies use a combination of zero, first, and third party data to mine for insights that can help them find ways to sell better to you!
• 3rd party agencies aggregate and sell your data to companies. For example, consumer research companies sell data to retailers so they can make better decisions.

But you are not seeing ANY of that revenue.

Plus, people see all kinds of issues with privacy and cybersecurity. For example, did you know that it’s best not to publish your upcoming travel plans on social media? And that the IT support guy calling you by name and asking you to type in something on your computer may be a hacker!

So people have been trying all kinds of things to protect their privacy and prevent monetization of their data and security issues. They use a VPN, adjust their privacy settings, and limit the amount of personal information they share online, among other things.

All this is good but it’s also futile in the long term. Unless you want to live in a paranoia bubble.

Can You License Your Personal Data?

Various efforts have come up to help users monetize their personal data using data licensing:

Data licensing platforms aim to help individuals monetize their personal data by trying to act as the gatekeepers of your data. Blockchain has been touted as a way to do this better.

But all this is also useless.

That’s because these are forces that you can’t control.

Let’s see.

You want to open a bank account and transact. Your bank doesn’t give you an offer opt-out of analytics option. They ARE going to use your data for analytics. If you want to stop them, you need to stop using them. Same is true of Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok etc. To stop using them is not an option for most of us.

The only way this can happen is by regulation and by mutual interests.

Regulation and Mutual Interests

On the regulation front, GDPR is one step towards at least recognizing that you have control over your data. Like most regulations, even though GDPR has widely proven to be highly wasteful, it has one big benefit –  it has paved the way for your data to be seen as your data. So we are 1 step closer in our journey.

On the mutual interest front, companies such as Facebook already allow creators on their platforms to monetize their content. It’s a great example of a win-win situation.

In addition, in a way, creators and experts do get their payment from Google in terms of higher visibility, clicks, and downstream revenue. That’s how they monetize their personal data on Google. 

Is there hope?

Yes, there is. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see more awareness and more models where intermediaries insert themselves into the mix and help monetize our personal data. Things won’t be free, but at least we’ll be making money!

My guess is that the money we make from all this will NOT be enough to offset the value of services we get for free today. What we should instead be aiming for is more responsibility on the part of those that monetize our personal data.