Facebook, Google, and dozens of other internet giants make billions off various slices of people’s personal data. For the most part, they provide you services in exchange for your data, without paying a cent. But if you could charge, how much would you want?
Boston University’s Tesary Lin and Chicago Booth’s Avner Strulov-Shlain looked into this question in experiments involving 5,000 Facebook users. The answers depend on the kinds of data in question, how you’re asked for them, and who you are, the researchers find.
“Websites use a combination of tactics, including different defaults, ‘nudging,’ and even obfuscation to get users to give up their data,” Strulov-Shlain says. “We wanted to see how users innately value their data, how the architecture of the choice presentation may affect users’ decisions, and whether some people are more susceptible to these differences than others.”
Since 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has required websites to alert users before collecting personal data so that people can opt out. Websites handle this in various ways, sometimes making it easy to “reject all cookies” and sometimes requiring a user to do some extra digging and clicking to get there.
How this framing of the permission question affects our decisions—and even how we value our data in the moment—hasn’t been clear. Lin and Strulov-Shlain asked participants what prices they would place on various types of personal data connected to Facebook, including biographical data, that about friends and followers, and information from posts and likes. In the study, they varied how choices were presented, sometimes making opting in (or out) the default and at times providing price ranges suggesting how much value participants may place on their data.
The researchers report three key findings. The first is that when given free rein, participants placed wildly different values on their data—from $0 to infinity—but they generally assigned the same order of importance to the categories. Data about friends and followers were worth the most, while information from posts and the “about me” section was worth the least.