Hacker News Reader

Comment by flagrant_taco | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really sure what would be considered cheap vs valuable here so I don't have a great answer there. My point was only that individusl data is collected and sold often, it must be valuable or there wouldn't be a market.

I'd be curious to see how the price compares when selling 10k individuals' data versus aggregate data the 10k people. Presumably if it was cheaper to buy all the individual data I would do that and aggregate it myself.

View on HN

The data is only useful in aggregate, but different people/use cases require different types of aggregations. Using pre-aggregated data is difficult, because it almost certainly hasn't been aggregated in the way that's convenient for whatever analysis you're trying to do with it.

The data is also useful individually. Jewish and single? Try JDate.

The aggregate data is often more useful in commercial use cases, but plenty of use cases need the indivual data as well.

Private investigators, three letter agencies, and any company wanting to send mailers to my new address when I move all need the individual data to target me specifically.

I totally agree the aggregate data is given more value in a commercial market heavily focused on advertising and now training LLMs, my only point was that there are markets that highly value individual data as well.

Sure, it is fractionally "valuable" in the sense that it is worth some tiny percentage of the large datasets it belongs to that get purchased for significant amounts.

I think the point stands that it wouldn't be easy to sell your individual data, and even if you could, it would be for a pittance from someone who is looking to build a large dataset. They certainly wouldn't be giving you an amount that justifies advice like "hold on to your data".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com