In general, people are not aware of what their data is worth

And it is normal that this is the case, because people who have an “ordinary” life do not think that the data of what we do in that life is useful to anyone. And that is a BIG MISTAKE.

Because one of the biggest businesses today is the analysis and sale of our data, and that is done by companies called Data Brokers, which are estimated to have a total turnover of around 200 billion dollars each year.

And those figures my dear friends are big words.

It is estimated that there are 4,000 Data Brokers companies (many flies always flock to honey) but only a few are very large.

One of the most important is Acxiom, which collects data from people in more than 23,000 servers that it has distributed, and others are Equifax, Towerdata, etc … There are many and they continue to grow in quantity and in business volume, since the data that we generate grows exponentially.

For those of us who are “outside” of this business, it is very difficult to know how people move within it, and what is paid for data. Only a few estimates are known.

And it is estimated that, for example, the health data of 1,000 people in the USA sells for 79 USD.

Depending on the possible business that some data can generate, I suppose that this will be the price that is paid.

But not only the Data Brokers get our information and offer it, also the large Internet companies (Amazon, Google, etc …) with which we interact have our data for their particular interests, and at the same time offer it to these Data Brokers to get additional income.

The Data and Information business is today’s and tomorrow’s big business.

It doesn’t make any sense for anyone to say: Who cares about my data?

Because they matter a lot. And those who say that only show a total ignorance about what happens around them.

There are people and associations who are fighting to make our data ours and only ours, and that no one can have them without our permission, or without paying us something to use it.

But that’s a very long-term fight, and at the moment big companies don’t want to know anything about it.

All that remains for us, the users, is to be sensitive to the subject and try to make them use the minimum of our data, and that is only achieved by not getting it.

Putting on the Internet (and social networks) the minimum of personal data, and disabling our tracking (tracking) in search engines (Google, etc …) and social networks.

There are tools (Brave, DuckDuckgo, etc …) that limit this capture of our data, and maintain a part of our privacy.

It is up to us to use the most appropriate.

And not because we have nothing to hide, but because our private life is ours and ours alone.