You probably already know what sort of intrusive information about you is up for sale — even if you’d rather not think about it. Your age, your phone number and where you live. What you bought for lunch yesterday, where you went afterwards and who you stood next to. How hard you press the brakes in your car. What billboard you walked past and whether you ever bought the item advertised there. ln the online data brokerage market all of that is up for grabs — sliced, diced and packaged for purchase. 

Given the quantity of data that is now constantly spilling out of us, it makes sense that some privacy fatigue might have set in. A few years ago I started taping over my laptop camera after seeing a photo of Mark Zuckerberg doing the same thing. If paranoia was good enough for a tech CEO, it was good enough for me. But this diligence didn’t last. When weather apps are selling your location and webcams are monitoring your eye movements, why bother with a piece of tape? 

In fact, why try to hide your data at all when you can be paid for it? Earlier this year a polling company called The Generation Lab attempted to set a price floor for personal information by offering young people an average of $50 per month to install a tracker on their mobile phones. The tracker doesn’t keep tabs on sensitive information like banking passwords, but pretty much everything else can be harvested. Scrolling habits, streaming choices and purchases — it’s all fed into a database for real-time analysis.