Studies that try to place a monetary value on consumer privacy have such varying results that researchers are beginning to conclude that it's the wrong approach
No one knows. And it might be time to stop asking. — For big tech platforms, this was the year when violating users' privacy got expensive. Tweets: @privacyproject , @willoremus , @profcarroll , @willoremus , and @lemonsand Tweets: @privacyproject : Figuring out what value consumers place on their personal data is starting to look like a fool's errand. The people who have studied it the most are beginning to come to the conclusion that it's the wrong approach altogether. — @WillOremus for @Medium https://onezero.medium.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : How much do people *really* care about online privacy? I wrote about the academic studies that try to put a dollar value on it—and why the researchers behind those studies are starting to think it was the wrong question all along. https://onezero.medium.com/... David Carroll / @profcarroll : In #TheGreatHack, Brittany Kaiser advocates for data as a property right to be “self-monetized” while I try to show why data rights must become human/civil rights in the USA. The cost to recapture my data started at £10 and quickly ballooned adding many zeros after legal fees. https://twitter.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : Among other things, the research on people's privacy choices makes clear that “people are still using Facebook” =/= “there is no tech backlash.” https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Angela Lashbrook / @lemonsand : “As long as [privacy is] viewed in economic terms, as a good to be bought, sold, and traded off between consumers and corporations, tech companies will have the upper hand.” This, by @WillOremus, is a must-read for people invested in privacy https://onezero.medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The data-for-services bargain has been the internet's default for decades — as one retrospective on how businesses collected and sold personal data long before ad targeting made it visible noted, Google and Facebook industrialized an old practice rather than inventing one [[a:932757]]. By 2019, that bargain was under political pressure on both sides: critics pushing strict limits were being labeled privacy fundamentalists who ignore the trade-offs inherent in the internet's economics.
Will Oremus's piece lands at the hinge point of that debate. If regulators can't pin down what consumers actually value their data at, the market-based framing underlying much US privacy thinking loses its empirical footing — which is exactly what the most-studied researchers in the field are now conceding.
First-order effects
- The willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept study literature loses credibility as a policymaking input: legislators weighing US privacy rules no longer have a defensible dollar figure to anchor harm estimates or 'data dividend' schemes.
Second-order effects
- Proposals that treat personal data as ownable property become harder to justify, reinforcing the argument that many circulating privacy proposals conflict directly with pro-competition goals by further entrenching the biggest platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy law shifts from price-based mechanisms (individuals valuing and selling their own data) toward structural defaults and design-level protection — the direction later coverage pointed when arguing that laws and technology should give users real choices instead of unreadable consent walls [[a:979510]].
The trend: Privacy policy is moving away from treating personal data as a commodity consumers can price and sell, and toward structural rules and defaults set by law and platform design.