Ashkan Soltani Says Putting a Price on Personal Data is an Important Step Forward

Senators Want Facebook to Put a Price on Your Data. Is That Possible?

By Gregory Barber

In these days of anti-tech ire, it’s a popular cocktail hour topic: How much is Facebook making off my data? Last year, I spent a month trying to find out, hawking my personal data on blockchain-based marketplaces. I came away with $0.003. On Monday, when Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) announced a proposal to force tech companies to tell users the value of their data, he was slightly more generous, ballparking the average at $5 a month...

Policymakers wrestling with the value of an individual’s data face a fundamental problem: While data often gets compared to oil, there’s no equivalent to benchmark crude for bits and bytes...

Perhaps, in the end, the answer will be that simpler is better. Any hard figure to put on our individual data would be an important step forward, says Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, especially when it comes to holding companies accountable. “We have this constant issue in privacy that when there’s a data breach, companies argue that there’s no harm because information doesn’t necessarily have any value,” he says. “This [bill] would force companies to articulate that value.” One method might involve developing a value based on real-time bids for our attention from advertisers...

In any case, whatever the exact value that gets assigned to our attention, perhaps a little more transparency will it remind us that “free” isn’t free, and get us thinking a little harder when we click “accept” on those privacy waivers. It’ll help if we have more options for what to do with our data. Having the option to delete it is one important step, Soltani notes, and Warner said he planned to soon introduce a bill that would make it easier to port data from one service to another. Eventually, users might find themselves with a bit more control.

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