Monetisation of personal data: how much is our data worth?

Initiatives concerning the “monetisation” of personal data, referring to the act of selling one’s data as a commodity, have developed in recent years. Some emerged from the private sector or academia, but others come from the public sector, for example Brazil’s public company dataprev has launched the dWallet initiative, which aims to facilitate the monetisation of personal data.

The CNIL recalls that “monetising” personal data, in the sense of transferring ownership rights, is not legally possible under current law, as individuals cannot waive their rights over their data (e.g. right to object, access, etc.).

In theory, one can still transfer a right of use and, under some conditions, a market mechanism can lead to an optimal allocation in that regard. Individuals who value their data less than companies do can sell it instead of giving it away for free: the company would make a profit while the individual receives compensation. Conversely, individuals who value their data more than companies do would refuse to grant usage rights. This theoretical optimal solution has attracted the interest of some economists (Bergemann et al., 2023) as a privacy regulation mechanism.

In practice, are individuals comfortable with the idea of monetising their privacy? If so, at what price and for which type of data?

These questions were studied by CNIL, through an online survey conducted from December 18 to 23 2024 among a representative sample of 2,082 French residents aged 15 and older.

Majority of respondents are willing to sell their data

65% of respondents reported there were willing to sell their data. Among them, only 6% would agree to sell it for less than one euro per month, while 14% would expect more than 200 euros per month. The most common valuation falls between 10 and 30 euros per month, preferred by 28% of respondents.

However, 35% of respondents said they did not wish to sell their data at all, no matter what the price is. This reflects for those respondents a rejection of the very idea of monetising personal data. Thus, two attitudes toward data monetisation coexist. For a minority of individuals, monetising privacy is unacceptable and induces a loss of welfare, regardless of the amount offered as a compensation.

This rejection of a monetary relationship becomes even more striking when we cross these answers with ones discussed in our previous publication, "Are we ready to pay for online services without targeted advertising?". Indeed, 60% of individuals who do not wish to pay for paid service options that offer better personal data protection also do not wish to sell their data.

 Theoretical price requested by respondents in exchange for their data

An economic trade-off between risks and benefits

The majority of respondents answered the question by weighing the perceived threat to their privacy against the proposed compensation, as predicted by the privacy calculus theory. Respondents who tend to seek higher compensation are also those who place greater importance on privacy as a criterion for evaluating the quality of a digital service. These findings are consistent with the economic literature, which demonstrates that individuals make such trade-offs. Empirically, prices increase when the data is sensitive, when the intended use is advertising, or when the shared data also concerns relatives (Wessels, 2019; Friehe et al., 2025), but also according to the intrinsic importance an individual places on their privacy (Schubert et al., 2021; Mager & Krantz, 2021).

Through this balancing process, respondents arrive at a relatively bounded price range, mostly between 1 and 100 euros. Indeed, among respondents willing to sell their data, 71% would agree to sell their data for an amount within that range.

Supply and demand for personal data

The article by Wernerfelt et al.,  2022, “Estimating the Value of Offsite Data to Advertisers on Meta”, examines the value of personal data for different advertisers around the world using Meta’s services. This work provides an example of an estimated demand curve for personal data.

The graph below illustrates this: the orange curve represents the share of individuals willing to sell their data (vertical axis) according to the proposed selling price (horizontal axis), while the blue curve represents the share of companies willing to buy data at that same price. For example, at a price of 5 euros, 20% of individuals would be willing to sell their data, while 90% of companies would be willing to buy it.

“Supply and demand” curve for personal data

Taken together, these results make it possible to approximate a market price for personal data of around 40 euros per month (and per subscribed service).

However, the presence of a minority of individuals for whom any participation in a market exchange of personal data generates an intrinsic disutility suggests that generalized data commercialization mechanisms, although theoretically coherent from an economic standpoint, could not be imposed universally without reducing overall social welfare.

In a concrete use case, we could expect that a fraction of the 35% of respondents not willing to sell their data may actually agree in exchange for an actual compensation. Similarly, we could expect the acceptance price to be lower than 40€ in practice. For comparison, a research paper conducted under experimental conditions in Germany found that the average selling price to obtain a Facebook contact was 19 euros (Benndorf & Normann, 2014), and that between 10% and 20% of individuals were never willing to share their data. The results of the CNIL’s survey are therefore quite similar.

These findings help shed light on how individuals relate to the monetisation of personal data, between rejection and a risk-benefit trade-off regarding privacy. This diversity underscores that the value people attach to privacy takes many forms, not all of which can be captured by a pricing mechanism.