Data prostitution

A street in Las Vegas or Amsterdam or Mumbai.  A lonely soul looking for some action.  The sexual kind.  The purveyors of said service are many.  To the highest bidder go the spoils.   While the world's oldest profession has benefited humankind as being a pleasure or a vice (viewed differently) it is fundamentally about a transaction.  A transaction where just like buying eggs at a supermarket the buyer and seller exchange value.

The value is determined in Euros or Dollars or Rupees and is considered legal or illegal depending on the lat and longitude of the location where said transaction takes place.  But in the end the parties to this transaction are left feeling adequately compensated.  This transaction also adds to the economic value of the society in its own way, again whether legal or otherwise.

This is the ideal and easy to follow scenario.

While human flesh and fluids are an integral part of the above described experience there is now a new contender in the 21st century that promises to take on a more aggressive and profitable role in shaping what will be the economic value paradigm.

Enter human data.  As in every little bit of information about a being that exists on the planet among its other eight or so billion competitors.  These carbon based organisms generate what some have labeled digital exhaust.  Even the person in the poorest country in a remote corner of Africa with no electricity might be generating some exhaust by virtue of their village being tracked by satellite and monitoring the heat signature of the fires they burn to keep themselves warm.  Of course the Instagramming 12 year old in Palo Alto is the other extreme case.

All this information is being collected and digested by massive computers and their complex algorithms for ultimately benefiting a select few who can both control access to the incoming data and processing power needed to output valuable insights used to market to or manipulate their targets.

The creators of the said data then need rejoice.  If all goes well it can be postulated that someone with the right capitalist bent might find that the idea of harnessing individual data is worth some compensation for the data generator.  The business model of the future can therefore define and assign a reward of commensurate value in the form of bananas, sex, a new car or whatever the consumer might fancy.

Enter the economy of data prostitution.