With all of the information being sold and re-sold all over the Internet your data has most certainly been sold to someone else. Not many people are happy about this and this is one of the most important issues in our modern digital age. Have you ever wondered just how much your data is worth to a company? We may have an idea as a recent lawsuit revealed just how much your information is potentially worth.
As a hint, it’s not as much as you might think.
Location Data Is Big Business
Free apps help to mitigate much of their cost by selling user information, particularly location data. Their ability to do that is hidden in the endless lines of legalese that is the Terms of Service and they count on the fact that no one actually reads those terms and just blindly hits I Accept.
Location data is critical for many of these apps. Weather apps need your location so it can give you the local weather. Sports apps will use this to suggest local teams for you to follow. Others will use it to recommend services in your area. Selling this data is a very lucrative business, with at least one report indicating that industry wide it is valued at over $20 billion in September of 2018 alone. In recent years the value was expected to increase several fold in the next few years. At least that was until the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal broke.
GasBuddy Selling User Location Data
With that known, it should be no surprise that the popular gas station app GasBuddy agreed to sell its user location data to the location-based marketing and analytics company Reveal Mobile in 2017. The information would include the user’s latitude, longitude, IP address and a time stamp. The app would gather the information even if it was not open and it provided a plethora of information on its users since the app had been downloaded over 10 million times.
GasBuddy gave each user a unique code which would be used by Reveal Mobile to tailor advertisements to a person. The information would be able to be provided to “whitelist customers” like advertisement agencies, political marketers, restaurants, social media and insurance companies.
GasBuddy Lawsuit
GasBuddy agreed to provide the data of 4.5 million users every month for the price of around $40,000 per month. Reveal Media though failed to pay, which prompted GasBuddy to file a lawsuit with nearly $220,000 in invoices unpaid. A settlement must have been reached since GasBuddy withdrew its suit in January.
So, how much is your data worth to a company? With 4.5 million users data being sold for about $40,000 it comes out to less than one penny per person! That is not much. This is apparently the only thing that can be bought for a penny anymore, since not even a penny costs one cent to make. Even penny items or penny stocks don’t cost a penny anymore. You would think that your information would be worth a little bit more than that wouldn’t you? Sorry Abe, but at least you are still on the $5 bill.
As issues like this come to the forefront more users of the Internet are becoming outraged. Digital privacy is one of the most important domestic issues that we face today. This has caught the attention of some lawmakers and one would figure that this would be an easy issue to gain bipartisan support and actually get something done with as little political grandstanding and bloviation as possible.
But we shall see…