Hey guys,
Quick question - how does an individual go about selling their personal data at a strictly individual level (e.g. browsing history, shopping habits, location etc.)
Also what data can be sold at this level?
Thinking of starting a super user friendly app for individuals to sell their data and make a few extra $'s per month.
I once heard someone ask, “If all these companies are making money selling my data, then why can’t I sell my own data and make some money?”
The explanation was, of course, that your data alone isn’t worth very much, but when sold alongside thousands of other users data it can be worth quite a lot.
So here’s the idea. No one likes to have their data collected and sold, but we all put up with it. This law would require companies to pay any users whose data they sell a percentage (let’s say 10%) of the money they get from selling their share of the data.
Now, this payment is going to likely only pay out like less than a penny most of the time, but the point isn’t for the users to make money. The point is to make it not worth selling data for these companies.
Now they have spend money to accurately track how much they owe you, spend resources on sending you a check / asking you to enroll in a payment system, and as a byproduct you would automatically know which companies are selling your data.
Could you see a law like this working? Are there ramifications that I haven’t considered? Could this be a good solution?
I was wondering how countries made being a data broker legal? They could sell your data to ANYONE regardless of what they are going to use it for - scammers, spammers etc. What are the justifications for that , it literary makes no sense to me. In any other business if you do this you would get fired or sued. For example if a hospital security guard gets paid by a random person to tell them who visited a hospital , when etc. Or if a bystander in a drug store just sits there and takes notes on which person buys what medicine and then sells their notes to somebody. Sure the people in those two examples witnessed events which are no secret (same way as collecting public information) , but if they sell it , it would be highly illegal.