How the Average American
Values Social Media Privacy
Online privacy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat of a hot topic at the moment… and while recently many of us might have been rushing to change our privacy settings, hide our information from anyone except our immediate family and two closest friends, or just delete our social network sites altogether, it’s true that not all of us have any intention of doing so.
Security based review, comparison and news site Security Baron thought it would be interesting to take the pulse of what America is thinking right now, and conducted a survey of 3,000 of us to find out just how much we value our social media data and how much we would sell it for, if someone offered to buy it.
- Vermonters value their social media data the most at $4,125, whilst those in West Virginia value theirs the lowest, at $375.
- One fifth of Americans admit they would buy or access someone else’s social media data.
- 23% of Americans would sell their social media data if they could profit from it.
It seems you can put a price on privacy. $2,163.15 to be exact, is the average amount people in the US would be willing to exchange their social media data for. Vermonters find their privacy harder to give up, valuing their social media data at $4,125. The people who valued their social media data the least were West Virginians; they would take a paltry $375 for theirs. Perhaps they don’t use social media as much, so maybe have a lot less data which would be of interest to advertisers – or maybe they just have nothing to hide. You can find out how your state compares:
The survey also found that 23% of Americans would sell their personal social media data if they had the option to profit from it themselves – i.e. if the information they give up has the opportunity to make them money. It’s one thing if the benefit is going to a third party, especially a large, faceless conglomerate, and quite another if personal remuneration is involved!
But maybe we’re not as concerned about what people can find out about us as we think we are; while a lot about data privacy has been covered in the news lately, only 23% of us have actually done anything with our privacy settings on social media since. And, somewhat shockingly, one fifth (21%) of Americans admit they would buy someone else’s social media data, if offered!
They do say knowledge is power, and the people we’d be most likely to buy social media data on are our friends (21%). This was followed by family (19%), parents in law (19%), ex partners (19%) – perhaps trying to look for some dirt on them in the process, or just track their habits to see if they’ve changed since we split, our current partner (14%), and co-workers (8%).
The survey also found that while we value our social media/personal data, 59% of us would rather have free access to social media and have our data sold on (as it currently is) than have to pay for social media where data was not sold on. And a substantial 63% of Americans feel we should be financially compensated for the data that had previously been sold onto a third party.
‘This is clearly an important issue,’ says Joe Auer from Security Baron. ‘Privacy is incredibly valuable, but this survey shows that we are, in fact, happy to put a price on it! Maybe this should be a wake-up call to us all to be more careful in future.’
