budlightbody t1_j1bckdw wrote on December 23, 2022 at 1:15 AM

Reply to comment by dr_jiang in TIL that DMVs in the US are allowed to sell some of your personal information and do. This practice is legal under federal law. For example, Florida’s DMV made $77 million and California’s DMV made $52 million in 2017 through this practice alone. by TheKeyboardKid

I would argue that's a good use of data.

Personally I enjoy targeted ads too, because it's things I'm actually interested in.

But we should all be getting paid to provide that data.

lux-libertas t1_j1cc55a wrote on December 23, 2022 at 6:25 AM

The challenge is that the amount of money that any individual’s information is worth is really small.

Eg, Meta’s CPMs are on the high end, the average for December is $14.18 (https://revealbot.com/facebook-advertising-costs).

So, if you’re one of the thousand people an advertiser wants to target, and even if you were to receive 100% of your portion of that value for your individual information, that comes out to… $0.01418. Your info would need to be bought over 7K times for you to get $100.

And of course, there’s no efficiency to buying any individual’s information as a one-off (that’s why they do it in thousands), so you NEED a broker to aggregate and be in the middle even if you wanted to sell your information, which would reduce your take even further and make the math even worse.

The reality is that the real value comes from scale as well as the detail and specificity of the information, and scale is generally the more important piece.