I can’t seem to find an actual currency estimate of how much privacy is actually worth. I see a ton of articles talking about why privacy should be worth more to people or what people would pay for privacy services or how much people would sell their privacy for, but I don’t see anything that gives a value for the privacy industrial complex, so to speak. Like if you take every company and non-profit and everything else and throw it all together, how much is the privacy industry actually worth?
Edit: It’s worth at least $2.8 billion US dollars because that is the market cap on average of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero.
Edit 2: If you put Monero, Zcash, and Dash together, you come up with $3.4 billion US dollars.
Edit 3: All the above plus Signal, Proton and EFF bring it up to 3.5 billion.
This is kind of like asking, “what is water worth?”
To an upper middle class person in the developed world, a dollar or two. To a person stranded in a desert, they might literally kill for it.
If you are just a Joe shmoe out in the world living a basic life, privacy might not be worth hardly anything. But if you’re a whistle blower or a political dissident in an authoritarian country, your privacy is worth everything.
Also it is worth noting that if you are in the US, there is a good probability that the authoritarian country will apply to you in the not so distant, foraeeable future
True, sadly. Honestly it’s already there in certain specific respects.
would seem to be rather subjective at the individual level. ie, how much is your dignity worth monetarily?
i would think most ‘private’ information is valuable only in aggregate
I’m not asking individually. I’m asking in aggregate.
Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.
For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.
And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.
cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance
There are websites that compare the invasiveness of different cars. Old cars are fine, but getting away from automobiles is still good when possible.
I’m not sure but I do know that my consent is worth more than my privacy.
Exactly. It shouldn’t be “what is privacy worth,” but more like what should you get in return for consenting to volunteer your privacy? Because right now the system is backwards. We are expected to give up privacy, are expected to have none. And we spend money and time to try to get it back with almost no guarantees.
This article might help answer some of your questions:
- Take it or leave it.
That’s completely subjective…
