The value  ofour personal data

The regular cases that hit the headlines concerning the resale or exchange of personal data (Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Google, Whatsapp, the various hacks…) have made us realize that our personal data is a precious asset for the digital giants. The implementation of the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation) at the European level for all companies clarifies that this new Eldorado concerns all companies, regardless of their size: because all companies collect and use data whether it concerns their customers or their employees… It was therefore important to regulate the framework.

Our personal data is a strategic asset that we often accept to share for free in exchange of a free service. If the service we are offered is free, we are certainly the product to sell…

In fact, the RGPD allows European consumers to own their data and to control its use. But then, if we own it, why can’t we resell it and at what price?

What data are we sowing all over the place?

They are of all kinds:

• our identification data and our socio-demographic data: Who are we?
• our contact information: How to contact us?
• our purchases: What do we buy? What type of buyers are we?
• our geolocation data: Where are we?
• our bank details
• our website visits, our conversations, our “likes”, the videos we watch, the messages we tweet, the pages we follow: What are our interests?
• the moments of life we are in: Will I buy a car soon? Am I pregnant? Will I retire soon?…
• And everything can be bought and paid for, more or less.

And everything can be bought and paid for, more or less expensively.

Not all data is created equal. 

According to a 2015 Ponemon Institute study, Internet users would be willing to sell their data if digital companies paid the price: from 2€ for their name and gender to 70€ for their login and password, including 11€ for their photos and videos, 15€ for their geolocation information, 19€ for their purchase history, 33€ for their banking information, 55€ for their health information…

And if, in addition, we are in a particular moment of life (a move, a birth, a wedding, the purchase of a vehicle…), our data becomes even more valuable (sometimes several hundred euros!) because it could have a strong impact on our consumption. Take the example of a food distributor: the “life-time value” of a pregnant woman is much higher than that of an average consumer. Detecting a period of pregnancy in order to try to build customer loyalty is an opportunity that has a clear, identified and quantified market value.

Today, how are our personal data used?

First of all, for targeting purposes: it is essential to know your prospect, your customer and their needs in order to know which product to offer them.

But more importantly, it is the ability to influence our buying behavior and decisions that will increase the value of our data: the company that has detected my desire to change my car will only be able to take advantage of it when it is able to influence my choice of the brand of vehicle that will make me the concrete and proven consumer that it expects.

Artificial intelligence has allowed the web giants to become masters of targeting and to build their dominant position by influencing our purchasing decisions with a better probability than any actor before and by constantly soliciting us even in our daily decisions (which is the best bakery around me? what kind of shoes should I offer to my husband who just started trail riding?…). They base their business model on the collection of personal data, which they monetize through targeted advertising. In return, they make their services available on the web “for free”.

Don’t be fooled either, digital has not invented anything in terms of data exploitation. More than 60 years ago, mass retailers had already understood its importance when they set up the first loyalty programs. By collecting a lot of information about us through the loyalty card, they can influence us every week through coupons and personalized promotions, and at the same time build our loyalty. Our purchase history allows them to predict our present and future needs.

How much do the Web giants earn from the exploitation of this data?

It’s very complicated to answer this question: there is currently a lack of transparency about the revenues that the web giants get from the exploitation of our personal data. They even claim that it is difficult for them to put a figure on the revenues they get from their exploitation. Facebook, for example, regularly claims that it does not sell data, but provides a service to its clients, agencies and advertisers. One official indication, however, is that Facebook provides information in its financial statement about the revenue earned per user ($35 per user in North America, $11 in Europe, $3 in Asia). But this average doesn’t say much about how it monetizes each click on its platform.

And if we were to put a price tag on our data, how would we do it?

If we start from the assumption that our digital “traces” on social networks (posts, likes, shares…) take value in the exchange, digital “traders” would have to establish a value to these data. The important thing in advertising is the target rather than the content (it’s not so much the product that matters, but the person to whom it is addressed), so to sell them, it would be necessary to value each contribution according to the sender and the recipients, having given their consent of course, and then to share the income from the exploitation of the data between them.

However, let’s imagine that the 4.5 billion Internet users in the world were to commercialize their personal data, the current value of the data would fall according to the principle of the law of supply and demand.

And if we could market our data, what steps should we take?

If we had to do it alone, it would be, in addition to being a real headache, not very profitable:

• On the one hand, we would then have to contract directly with each company interested in our data: each would have to negotiate the terms of the contract, draw it up, and manage the shipment of the data concerned.
• On the other hand, the value of our data lies in the ability of a company to influence a large number of individuals in their choices. “Data on an individual scale is worthless! Its market value only comes from mass aggregation,” says Valérie Peugeot, member of the CNIL, president of the Vecam association and researcher at Orange Labs.

The Think Thank Génération Libre therefore imagines the emergence of a new profession of data agent, who would manage the property rights linked to the data in exchange for a commission, like artists’ agents.

Rather than letting everyone manage their own data assets, Antonio Casili (Télécom ParisTech/EHESS) and Paola Tubaro (CNRS) propose to set up a collective negotiation, under the leadership of the CNIL, to defend the rights of data workers.

Today, the negotiation of personal data is practiced on a different scale: specialized brokerage firms gather billions of data from millions of Internet users around the world and sell them to companies in all sectors that wish to identify prospects interested in their products. For example, a bank can buy a file of 100,000 people likely to buy a property within a year from the broker, for a few cents per contact.

And the thread of data trading is not about to dry up with the rise of connected objects and the increasingly intensive use of social networks that multiply the opportunities to collect data on our daily lives.

What are the political initiatives around these data exchanges?

The first and most advanced one concerns the Transparency around data exchanges initiated in Europe with the implementation of the RGPD which allows European Internet users to become legal owners of their data and to control their uses via:

• The list of all data collected
• The collection of explicit consent for their use
• The reinforcement of the right to be forgotten
• The authorization of the portability of its data

In the United States, two American legislators are proposing a “DASHBOARD” law, Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight and Regulations on Data, which would force service providers with more than 100 million active users per month (in other words, the GAFAs) to calculate and reveal the value of the personal data they collect, in the interests of transparency. These companies would be forced to reveal what personal data they collect, how that data is used, and how much they make from it. If the bill is passed, the SEC, the U.S. securities regulator, would be responsible for developing a methodology for calculating the value of the data.

However, this proposed law does not provide for direct payment to users by platforms. On this monetization of data, 2 currents are strongly opposed:

• The most liberal: the one concerning the patrimoniality of data proposed by Génération Libre, which would like to create a right of ownership of one’s personal data, where everyone would be able to make this capital grow like other assets they own.
• In contrast, the Secretary of State for Digital, Mounir Mahjoubi decided in 2018: “I am against any ownership and sale of personal data.” The National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) is also concerned about how to guarantee the right to privacy for all Internet users if everyone negotiated on their own. Its former president, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, said that “this approach breaks with our deep humanist and personalist convictions, in which the right to protection is a fundamental right, echoing the very essence of human dignity: naturally, this right is not a commercial right”. The former PS deputy Julien Dray even proposes to introduce a tax on GAFA which would allow to distribute “a universal endowment of 50,000 euros for each of us, from the age of 18”.

The time when we will all be able to be rentiers of our data is still far away …