back to article That PERSONAL DATA you give away for free to Facebook 'n' pals? It's worth at least £140

“Who would have predicted, 20 years ago, that you’d get free stock quotes, free maps and a free encyclopaedia?” WiReD magazine’s “Senior Disruptor” Kevin Kelly* told a London conference last week. But new consumer research for telecoms multinational Orange indicates that even at a price of free, the punter is being ripped off …

  1. wyatt

    Nothing is free, no matter what it is. There is always a reason you don't pay for something even if you can't see it.

  2. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Real or imaginary

    > UK users price data revealing their sexual orientation to an unfamiliar organisation at £12.82, the study finds

    So how many people reading this have ever received a cheque in the post for revealing (or making up, there's no way to tell) any personal information whatsoever? Likewise, whever I fill in an online registration form that asks for anything more than a nickname and a password, I don't hear the kerchinnng of a cash register anywhere in the registration process.

    So while the average interviewee in the street might well state this pie-in-the-sky amount when asked a direct question, it doesn't seem to bear any resemblance to what actually happens to any personal information that floats around on the internet. But then again: neither does that information have anything in common with the person who submitted it.

    P.S. Here ya' go El Reg. See how much you can get for this:

    Name: Pete

    Last name: Two

    Postcode: PR8 2ZW

    DOB: 01-April-1966

    Occupation: Goat neuterer (no kidding!)

    Income: £50,000 p.a. (mainly backhanders from the goats)

    1. AndyS

      Re: Real or imaginary

      Agreed. There is a market for this data, but it's between companies, and not consumer facing. As such no value picked out of thin air by a consumer means anything - the actual value is what 3rd party companies are willing to pay for it.

      When I first opened the article, it had a sub-heading about £15.50 (you can see the title has changed by comparing it to the URL) - I suspect that's what this figure is. The real, traded value of a full suite of information including address, employment history, etc that people regularly upload to Facebook.

      But you know what? Most people know this, and reckon it's worthwhile. Nobody's going to start demanding £140 (or whatever other arbitrary figure a survey puts on it) to use things like Facebook, Google etc. The logical decision is that they are happy trading this info for access to some pretty extensive services.

    2. Khaptain Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Real or imaginary

      So we have a 48 year born on Aprils Fools day that smashes goats nuts for a living. With an income of 50K we can safely assume that his middle class status affords him some small luxurys or hobbies.

      So we have an age group, a profession , we can only pray that he is a qualifed Vet and we have a location. We also have at least one hobby, perusal AND participation on the El Reg forums, so we can assume that he also has a modicum of humour..

      Given the location and age we might start by offering some Yachting activity related publicity, golf clubs, some nice nikon binos in case he is an avid bird watcher - proximity to nature reserve or even some 4*4 vehicules with which he can visit aforementioned future Eunuchs, thereby appealing to his masculine side. (or even some new Nike trainers due to proximity of what appears to be the longest pier in existance.)

      There appears to be several small farms, zoo and parks within a reasonable distance so lets presume that the "subject" travels to and from these location for professional purposes. A nice little GPS unit, a set of tires, breakdown assurance, why not....

      Now what else could we serve up to a man that handles goats nut on a daily basis..... whilst remaining legal...

      1. Pete 2 Silver badge

        Re: Real or imaginary

        > Now what else could we serve up to a man that handles goats nut on a daily basis..... whilst remaining legal...

        Kebab sticks and a book of barbeque recipes?

    3. John Bailey

      Re: Real or imaginary

      "So how many people reading this have ever received a cheque in the post for revealing (or making up, there's no way to tell) any personal information whatsoever? Likewise, whever I fill in an online registration form that asks for anything more than a nickname and a password, I don't hear the kerchinnng of a cash register anywhere in the registration process."

      Well. Me for one.

      A survey site I used to belong to sent me a cheque for £50 at least once a year. Not many surveys though. And I think it folded.

      Plenty of others still around. £40-60 a year from the ones I use is about average All in tokens these days though..

      Personal data has certainly got value. But I'm afraid they will want a bit more engagement than your email address and an expectant grin.

    4. John Tserkezis

      Re: Real or imaginary

      "P.S. Here ya' go El Reg. See how much you can get for this:"

      You left out your credit card and CCV numbers. Those would greatly improve your data's worth...

  3. Anomalous Cowshed

    The pitfalls of giving away your personal data

    You've just moved in to your first home after leaving your parents' place, you are having breakfast and you see, on the box of cornflakes, that they are running a 'win a brand new Bollogs breakfast cereal bowl' competition.

    1. Your reaction is: "Yippee! I would love to have that Bollogs cereal bowl, it's so colourful and completely free of charge!" You fill in all your contact details and sit back, waiting for the cereal bowl to materialise.

    2. After a few unsuccessful attempts, you start to get a bit wary. You begin to look a bit closer at the small print, and you see, written in Microscopica MT 0.0001 point font: "We won't use your contact details to try to sell you anything". You smile and nod to yourself: you knew it all along, Bollogs are completely above board. They just need my full name, phone number, address, e-mail address, age, profession, sexual orientation, record of criminal convictions, race, political affiliation, creed, social security number, nationality, salary, favourite newspapers, home insurance provider, life insurance details, naked photos of girlfriend...for the competition. You forget to check for the presence of a sentence in which they promise NOT TO GIVE AWAY / SELL your contact details to other companies.

    3. A few years pass, and you are at least older if not wiser, and receiving a lot of junk mail, SPAM and unsolicited phone calls; suddenly you begin to realise that the game isn't really worth it: you're giving away precious data that can and will be used mercilessly against you in direct marketing / customer stalking campaigns, in return for a remote, infinitesimal chance of winning something of zero value...

    Facebook is merely the zenith, the acme, the ultimate social engineering trick. It's a million times more effective than any phishing campaign. You voluntarily and even aggressively give your whole privacy away, in return for bogus 'friends' on an electronic bulletin board. And then you wonder what makes Facebook, which is free to use, worth 200 billion USD...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Beverly Hills 90210" was the best show ever!

    because it means that I know a valid US zip code for filling in my "personal" details.

    My occupation, you ask? "Accountant" - presuming your drop-down list is alphabetically sorted...

    1. monkeyfish

      Re: "Beverly Hills 90210" was the best show ever!

      I prefer the Simsons gangster base, 123 Fake Street. Postcode (as I'm in the UK) is AB12 3CD (somewhere in Aberdeen), phone number is 01234567890. Easy to remember if I'm forced to enter it later too.

      1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

        Re: "Beverly Hills 90210" was the best show ever!

        Another useful trick, without landing someone else with your junkmail is that UK postcodes with "D" as the first digit are invalid, even if the code satisfies the letter/digit pattern of UK postcodes. D was reserved for "Dublin", which just shows how long the Royal Mail took from planning to implementation of national postcodes.

        From years of having to fill in those damned passenger arrival forms, I tend to use 95014 if I need a throwaway US ZIP Code.

        1. PhilBuk

          Re: "Beverly Hills 90210" was the best show ever!

          How come Derbyshire uses DE as it's Code?

          1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

            DErbyshire

            ... it's East of Dublin ;)

            I guess it's only the D1..D99 sequence that was left unallocated, but the original plans did include Irish allocations which were never "un-allocated".

            That was more of a hangover from the time when Ireland was in the UK, unlike the current German car registration system, which, when it was created in the mid 1960s, reserved single-letter codes L,G, and P for the cities of Leipzig, Gera and Potsdam that were in the then independent country of East Germany. (Other combinations were reserved for territories in what was East Prussia, as West Germany did not drop its territorial claim to these lands until 1970)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Beverly Hills 90210" was the best show ever!

        Or if you're a fan of the Blues Brothers, no doubt you'll report you live in Chicago at 1060 W. Addison St.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ...phone number is 01234567890

        So you're the b'stard who keeps giving marketers my 'phone no?, sheeshh, stop it already!!

  5. Buzzword

    Not all data is equal

    Knowing somebody's income is much more valuable if that income is high than if it's low. Marketers pay more for a database of 100 high earners than 10,000 breadline earners.

  6. Ross K Silver badge

    “Who would have predicted, 20 years ago, that you’d get free stock quotes, free maps and a free encyclopaedia?”, WiReD magazine’s “Senior Disruptor” Kevin Kelly* told a London conference last week.

    Knowing Wired, whatever came after that quote was a thinly disguised blatant Apple advertisment.

    Also, I think a "disruptor" is a person who thinks he can bring about a shift in thinking. Sounds like something from a game of Wank Word Bingo...

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Michael Strorm Silver badge

    "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

    The phrasing you quoted was "free stock quotes, free maps and a free encyclopaedia”. Note... "free".

    You say "Twenty years ago [i.e. 1994] people were obtaining maps and real-time stock quotes through CompuServe – and had been for years"

    If by "for years", you're extending that back into the 80s... well, yeah, Compuserve probably offered that, but from everything I've heard it was *bloody expensive* at that time. Anything from US $5 (off-peak) to $30 per hour (*) in the early 80s- and still circa $10 per hour at the end of the decade.

    Maybe you didn't have to pay any *extra* for the stock quotes (or did you?)- but if I was paying those sorts of prices for a closed information service (rather than the modern concept of generic Internet access) I'm damn sure I'd be assuming they were part of what I was paying for rather than a generous freebie!

    (*) NOT adjusted for inflation! Multiply by almost three times to get the modern equivalent :-O

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

      "Maybe you didn't have to pay any *extra* for the stock quotes (or did you?)- but if I was paying those sorts of prices for a closed information service...."

      The "free" stock prices AFAIR were always delayed, and as such they were a nice freebie if you were interested, without really being precise enough for trading purposes. If you were paying a closed information service you'd expect higher charges and as near real time as the technology of the day allowed.

      1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

        Re: "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

        Actually, today the "free" stock quotes are still delayed - usually up to 15 minutes. Fine for deciding on whether you should phone your broker today, but you're not going make money out of wiring the "free" price feed to an automated trading system.

    2. Irongut

      Re: "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

      So nowadays you don't pay an ISP to allow you access to the Internet to get your free stock quotes and maps Michael? Just because Compuserve was more expensive than your current connection doesn't make that charge mean something different.

    3. Tom 38
      FAIL

      Re: "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

      This is hugely valid point, because in the 80s and 90s we paid for internet access and now we don't... oh wait, that's not right....

      1. Les Matthew

        Re: "Free" if you're paying Compuserve $30 an hour?!

        Well here in the UK it was £20 to £30 an hour and you had to also pay shed-loads of money to British Telecom.

        Hardly compares to the cost of always on broadband nowadays.

        Nearly forgot, you also had to shell out nearly a grand for a high speed modem.

  9. Lamont Cranston
    WTF?

    I'm confused.

    Are these prices that the social networks/ad agencies have put on personal data, or values that consumers have put on their own data?

    The first set would have some meaning, the second set would be hot air.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I've always thought that every time Google/Facebook/etc generates revenue from something I do on their site, they should send me a percentage. After all, the labourer is worthy of his hire.

    All we need to do is to negotiate about the percentage. 80/20, in the user's favour, seems like a good starting point, as Google would make nothing at all if I hadn't done something.

  11. Mike Flugennock

    Oh, cripes, another "disruptor"...

    Do you think that we can now safely declare the term "disruptive/disruptor" to be officially played? These tech clowns have pretty much beaten it to death and drained it of any impact.

    Like "ecosystem", "disruptor" is now on my list of words which are sure signs that the user is entirely devoid of any original ideas.

    "Senior Disruptor"? Cripes, gimme a big, fat break. Hell, the job title on Wile E. Coyote's business card -- "Super Genius" -- sounded more substantive than that.

  12. Elmer Phud
    Facepalm

    Blimey

    Have people actually filled in all the fields?

    And with real info?

  13. Spleen

    Fair enough. If all the info I've provided Facebook with is actually worth £140, then since I signed up to Facebook I've paid £20 per year, or £1.67 a month. For that I get a convenient place to communicate with my friends and people in my sports club, organise social events and show off my amateur efforts at photography. Seems very reasonable to me.

  14. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Funny money

    So how do they come up with this valuation? I'm guessing that the calculations involved are much the same as the way they "value" companies like FB etc - realistically, if everyones data was worth that price then you have a market opportunity to offer to pay everyone something like 45% of the determined value and then resell the data and make a bunch of money.

    But nobodies doing that are they?

    Truth is, it's just another bubble waiting to pop.

    1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge

      Re: Funny money

      So how do they come up with this valuation?

      Well, a previous one of these surveys involved stopping people in the street, and asking them to give you personal information. When they refuse (which they always did), you then offer them money, and ask them to name a price.

      Unsurprisingly, when confronted by another human being asking the question, people become a lot less open about divulging their information than they do when it's an "anonymous" machine presenting them with a form.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Funny money

      I find it very hard to believe its anything other than a bubble, when all there ever seems to be at the end of all the data grabbing is yet more advertising in one form or another. And since that seems more and more to irritate the daylights out of an increasing number of users, you'd imagine the high water mark can't be too far off. Short of increasing the cost of insurance, health and other services based on some data-driven notion of 'risk', its hard to see what else they have up their sleeve to justify silly values when ads are finally given the universal big finger.

    3. veti Silver badge

      Re: Funny money

      I've read the article, and I still have no idea where that "140 pounds" comes from.

      The value of data isn't "whatever some random self-selected sample of people claim they'd let it go for if someone hypothetically offered it to them". It's "what someone, who presumably has a business plan in mind for making use of it, will actually pay for it".

      The number of active profiles on Facebook, according to Facebook, is about 1.3 billion, and their market capitalisation is about $200 billion, which implies that the value of Facebook's total assets - including the company's brand recognition, physical, logical and human assets, legal and financial relationships, as well as just the raw data - is in the region of $150, or 93 pounds, per active user.

  15. harmjschoonhoven

    Re: the price of personal data

    The survey asked an equivalent of "If your car is stolen, what would be its value on the black market?".

    Both stealing cars and using personal data for a purpose it was not intended for are punishable by law. In the later case f.i. CELEX:31995L0046 'Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data', Official Journal L 281 , 23/11/1995 P. 0031 - 0050 and national laws like the Dutch 'Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens' supervised by http://www.dutchdpa.nl/ .

  16. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Happy

    Google fair exchange?

    If you go into it with your eyes open, Google is not a bad deal. Free email, calendar, mobile syncing/backup/management, file sharing, cloud storage, maps, translation, instant messaging, video calling, on-line document editing and collaboration......

    All for £140 a year! Bargain!

  17. Queasy Rider

    Just Wondering...

    if your info is worth $200. and gets sold to 1,000 companies, does that make it worth $200,000. or is it really a case of the info being worth $0.02 and being eventually sold on to 100 purchasers who each sell it on to 100 more, etc. etc?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like