[jebblue]

>> The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself.

It is valuable to the company you're giving it to since they get paid by the advertising. They also get money from their partners who we so graciously agree to allow them to "share" it with which happens to be for profit for them.

>> The data is a means to an end, which is showing you relevant ads. >> If everyone stopped using Facebook tomorrow, the value of all the information Facebook has gathered would be negligible.

They can still sell your information to whomever they want which means even in your scenario they would still be making tons of money, I'm guessing here, hundreds of millions IMHO. So your arguments are not correct.

[austenallred]

Right, that's why I said it's not valuable in and of itself. It helps them make money, no doubt, but there's not much of a market for that data alone. The only other potential buyers would be the people who already have a platform to display ads.

But let's play devil's advocate and say they could sell the data for $100M (I think that's extraordinarily high). Given Facebook's 1.4 Billion monthly active users, that values the data at about $.14 per user.

Facebook's market cap is $270B ($187.5 per user). In other words, using obviously sketchy numbers, your attention is worth approximately 2,800 times more than your data.