I Sold My Data for Crypto. Here's How Much I Made
On a recent Tuesday night, during a session of rash bedtime scrolling, I sold my Facebook data to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Reckless, maybe, but such was my newfound life as a digital vigilante. My tipping point was the Facebook hack, exposed in September, in which I—along with some 90 million other potential victims—was temporarily locked out of my account. I imagined my identity rippling across the internet, thanks to the single sign-in convenience of Facebook Connect. After a long season of leaks, hacks, and shady data pillaging, I’d had enough. I considered simply deleting my account. But then I landed on a different strategy: making a profit.
If my data is already being hawked to marketing firms, third-party apps, and political propagandists without my knowledge, I reasoned, why not benefit from the racket? Thus began an experiment in turning my personal data into crypto dough.
Appealing to people indignant over their data being abused, a new wave of companies is peddling an alluring message: Users should own their data and get a cut of its value. They advocate a return to the internet’s intended state of decentralization, before Facebook and Equifax became digital oligarchs. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, is building a platform called Solid, which will allow users to control which services access their data; Ocean Protocol, a decentralized exchange where people sell their data directly to AI businesses, has attracted tens of millions in VC funding while still in development. In the meantime, a handful of scrappy data-marketplace apps are attempting to get in early.
