What is the value of your Facebook profile? It is a question I have been thinking about for a while now.
Time for some napkin Math:
Facebook is a company with some perceived dollar value. It makes its money from all the users that are active on its site at any given time. So if we assume that all things are created equal (the assumption is simplistic), it’s a simple matter of division.
1. Facebook’s monthly active users amount to about 2.7 Billion in the second quarter of 2020, or so they estimate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
2. The market cap for Facebook on October 20, 2020 is about $762 Billion.
That suggests that the net value of each monthly active user’s profile data on Facebook is worth about $762B/2.7B = $282.2.
That’s what your account and your activity on Facebook is worth. Someone likely owes you that dollar amount.
There is a lot of talk about breaking up big tech and regulating for privacy concerns. But no one is talking about concrete mechanisms that are available for such regulation.
For the past 10 years I have been hearing over and over again that Data is the new Oil. Well, Oil is priced today at $40-odd per barrel: https://www.bloomberg.com/energy. That price — a concrete dollar amount — allows companies, nations, and individual citizens to make policy, decisions and choices around their consumption of oil.
If Data is the new Oil, I think it’s time to start putting a sticker price on it, and use that value to make policy around it, and regulate it.
Obviously the $282 amount/figure is no where near accurate. For one thing not all data across all user profiles and accounts on FB.com is equally useful or revenue generating. I also never considered the monetary value of other non-people entities like Facebook Groups or Events; or publicly known entities on the network like the NYTimes or the Olympics that are really organizations and institutions.
A better estimate of the real value of your data on Facebook, at a far granular level will come next.
But on this day, $282 is a start.
Winter Rant 
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