Thanks for the responses, very interesting, and I agree with the comments about individual value for selling data from social media account. I am bit concerned I may not have been clear in expressing my thoughts, which is my mistake.
Just to clarify, I am not a fan of the current business models. I use paid-for email, storage, and other web-services that offer privacy. Likewise I use open-source OS and software and no social media. But I recognise I am in the minority (not on this site, but generally), and want to explore alternative means of business models involving data, not just what I want.
Paying for the data was only one of the options I listed, I’m interested why people haven;t picked up on the other options and non-social media sources of data? Perhaps it;s because I picked the wrong discussion title. These aren’t all about monetary gain or exchange. It’s using data as a means to enable and enact things. Data about us is sold to credit rating agencies, insight programmes, insurers, utilities etc. The price they pay varies, but my not reflect its true value or what we believe it is worth. But I don’t want to digress into a market-based uber capitalist discussion on selling data. It’s not what I meant to get into, but left in the option.
I took part in a NESTA forum (UK) on data and privacy and someone rightly argued our data, in the form of medical data in this instance, can be of great use to society. Denying all uses of your data may hold back collective progress - that;s down to each of us to discuss. That’s what I was referring to with donating data, What stops this at the moment is trust, scope creep, control and security over the data, amongst other things.
So when I am talking about data, I mean the consolidated form of data from your various services, purchases, governmental records, insurance, marketing, search engines apps, store cards, and of course, social media.
We can’t control all of this data, but things might change in the EU under the new GDPR data regs (see https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-request-your-personal-data-under-gdpr/) when people start using Subject Access Requests to obtain exactly what data and information/knowledge organisations hold about you. Recognition and understanding might induce a culture shift on the back of the awareness of Facebook et al recently.
So I guess I am talking about things on a longer-term perspective, and about how you licence (thinking like Creative Commons), control or yes, get financial or exchange value out of your data. Some people might be happy to release data for free games, media platforms etc, others may not, but at present we don’t have transparency or an understanding of whether there is a net benefit to us.
I hope this makes more sense!
