Putting a price on our data won't make the platforms stop abusing our privacy

There are several proposals at the state and federal level to force the Big Tech platforms to disclose how much our data is worth to them -- with the hopes that this will curb their abuses of our privacy and even offer an income-stream that could benefit low-income users.

But as my EFF colleague Hayley Tsukayama writes, "Our information should not be thought of as our property this way, to be bought and sold like a widget. Privacy is a fundamental human right. It has no price tag. No person should be coerced or encouraged to barter it away. And it is definitely not a good deal for people to receive a handful of dollars in exchange for allowing companies invasive data collection to remain unchecked."

That's because the sums that Big Tech sells your data for are often very small relative to the costs those data-sales exact from you, from realtime location data being sold for less than $0.01/user to "lists of 1,000 people with different conditions such as anorexia, depression and erectile dysfunction for $79 per list. Such embarrassing information in the wrong hands could cost someone their job or their reputation."

What's more, Big Tech can use seemingly innocuous data as a proxy for more potentially sensitive information, like where you went to high school, but "mortgage lenders, using proxy variables such as their high school, charge African American and Latinx homebuyers higher interest rates as compared with whites in similar financial situation" -- you might give that information away to Big Tech, but the total costs are huge: "the way companies use this information overcharges minority homeowners up to $500 million per year."

Back in 2008, I wrote that "property" is the wrong way to think about information. Read the rest