In terms of assessing the value of one individual's data, shouldn't there be some consideration for the fact that it's worth nothing to that person on their own? I can't sell my data on the free market. It's a transaction over an object that has value in only one direction.
That depends on how much you value the free market as a means to an end versus an end in itself. Machine learning meta-models aren't very valuable by themselves, and raw personal data isn't valuable by itself, but their union creates a huge surplus of value. If you value the free market then any allocation of that surplus that happens in practice is a good allocation. If you don't, then it makes sense to look at properties you would like such an allocation to have and try to find a way to distribute the profits to meet your criteria.
As an example, the Shapley value in simpler, similar scenarios would allocate half the profits to whomever trained the model and distribute the other half equally among those individuals whose data was used (or equivalently, it would treat every interaction between the model-maker and a data-provider as splitting the profits 50/50). Actually calculating the Shapley value for something as nonlinear as the hypothetical profits from a trained model on various data subsets seems...problematic...but splitting some percentage of the profits equally among the participants won't be too far off the mark.
Is that really true? There are "customer research" apps that will offer you small, but non-trivial amounts of money for basically selling your personal information.
It's partially true. You can't sell most of your personal information. E.g., when your name, face, and weight end up in somebody's dataset it'll be because of the "free" social fitness app you used rather than because you were able to directly connect with anyone who cared about that data and work out a reasonable price.
So you're saying a marketplace hasn't been built yet. That's like saying your car had no value until Uber was built (only taxis have value), or short term rental homes had no value until Airbnb was built (only hotels have value).
Your data today has value. It's how you get access to Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, for the monetary cost of $0.00. That is value, and yes, you can't cash that out to $ _yet_. That's because a marketplace hasn't been built yet, but maybe legislation could create such a market and give consumers a fair shake.
The ancestor comment said they "can't sell [their] data on the free market," and we contested that statement and each other a bit.
Bringing up that a marketplace hasn't been built yet and that the data still has value is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation I thought we were having. FWIW, I agree with you -- a marketplace hasn't been built (not that I'm sure it should be), and our data definitely has value.
