“Warner’s proposal, introduced with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), would require companies with more than 100 million monthly users to disclose the types of data they collect about each user and to assess its value. It also includes privacy rules similar to those passed last year in California, where you will soon be able to request to delete all or some data held by others, and opt out from having it sold. The Senate bill directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to figure out how companies should calculate that value, with flexibility for different business models and ways data is used. Best of luck to them.But the trick is figuring out what your data is worth to a given platform. That could be more or less, depending on things like how useful you are to the company’s ad-targeting algorithms and how valuable you are to the advertisers themselves. “Any attempts are going to be an artificial average or need to be sensitive to how the market is constantly valuing data,” says Carroll. The harsh reality is that you and I probably aren’t worth very much at all to Facebook or Twitter, at least not alone.That gets complicated, fast. “When data is transferred into models, it becomes an abstraction of your data,” says Carroll. Say there’s a medical trial based on health data from your phone. If you’re perfectly healthy or represent a common demographic for a medical trial, your data probably isn’t worth much to researchers. Should sick people get paid more for signing up? There are experimental ways of figuring out the value of one person’s data to a particular model, but they’re complicated to calculate, and have to be calculated independently for each model.”
Senators Want Facebook to Put a Price on Your Data. Is That Possible?