I Might Be Spartacus: a differential privacy marketplace

While the idea of selling and controlling one's own data is enticing, would people actually be willing to set up the requisite hardware/software to manage it all? I can imagine a sort of "black box" that manages user preferences but for the average person who doesn't necessarily care about privacy, the proposition of earning a few dollars a month doesn't seem like a strong motivator.

Interesting, but what's to prevent the person selling the data from completely fabricating it (as opposed to following noise according to some differential privacy algorithm)? Or is the assumption that enough data owners are truthful that you could filter out this behaviour?

This is definitely a step forward in thinking regarding 'personal data control', but if you imagine 'data brokers' as the potential attacker here, and assume that their goal is to sell your information to the highest bidder, they still have some opportunity here.

They could/would form 'data validation' companies who would investigate the plausibly-deniable facts you had been distributing. For example, the validator could buy your age from five different vendors and likely end up with a pretty good approximation of your real age.

Ok, perhaps this creates a 'data marketplace' and there would be competition - but the situation is ultimately very similar to credit scoring agencies (Equifax et al), and clearly something is wrong in that industry.

There'd be ample opportunity for these data validators to follow the same pattern as credit scoring agencies and charge third parties for access to the validated data. And possibly even charge people to have details corrected. Regulation might help, but regulatory capture happens.

Some good ideas here and it'd be great to develop this further and make it more robust from attack.

Idea is very interesting and smart but I don't think people want to sell their data consciously. If Facebook get our data without our knowledge, it's kind of like acceptable but I don't think people push button to give away our data. It's a huge cognitive hinderance. And data can have value only when the volume is big. Since each data(small datasets) has almost zero value, i don't think it's expensive/attractive enough for us to push the button to sell it.

The article talks about it, but it seems too fantastical to me. I mean, what’s the business model really? Facebook earns around $2.5 a year per user, is enough people really going to bother selling their data for almost nothing?