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双语外刊 | 你的数据卖多少钱合适？

电商运营宝典

2025-09-25

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双语外刊

素材来源：FT

你的数据卖多少钱合适？

Is $50 a fair price for your data?

摩尔：个人信息不断地从我们身上产生出来，有些价值更高，有些价值更低，我们缺乏相关知识来获得准确的定价。

2025年9月24日 12:57 英国《金融时报》科技评论编辑伊莱恩•摩尔

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.

你大概已经知道，一些涉及你隐私的个人信息正在被出售——即使你宁愿不去想这件事。你的年龄几何、电话号码多少、家住哪里。你昨天午饭吃了什么、之后去了哪里、谁站在你身旁。你踩刹车的力度。你走过哪块广告牌，是否购买过上面推销的商品。这一切信息在网络数据中介市场上都能找到——被切割成不同大小和形状、包装好，等待买家。

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?

鉴于如今不断从我们身上产生出来的数据量，出现了某种“隐私疲劳”不难理解。几年前，我看到一张照片，上面马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)用胶带把他笔记本电脑上的摄像头遮住了，于是我也开始这样做。如果一位科技公司首席执行官(CEO)觉得有理由疑神疑鬼，那我也有理由。但没过多久我就放弃了。当天气应用在出售你的定位信息，网络摄像头在监测你的眼球运动时，为什么还要费工夫贴那一小块胶带呢？

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.

事实上，当你的数据可以卖钱时，何必还要费力去隐藏你的数据？今年早些时候，一家名为The Generation Lab的民调公司试图为个人信息设一个底价，他们承诺，如果年轻人愿意在自己的手机上安装一款追踪器，他们愿意支付平均每月50美元的价格。这个追踪器不会记录诸如银行密码之类的敏感信息，但可以采集几乎所有其他信息。滑屏习惯、流媒体选择、购物行为——这一切信息都会被输入一个数据库，供实时分析。

Is $50 per month a fair price for that level of scrutiny? The British mathematician Clive Humby was the first to come up with the phrase “data is the new oil” back in 2006. But the marketplace for this commodity, which is filled with private companies such as Fog Data Science, is opaque. Our personal information powers the digital advertising industry that underpins the internet. In return for surveillance, we get targeted adverts and free online services. What we don’t get is pricing clarity.

每月50美元获得这样程度的隐私信息，算是公道的价格吗？英国数学家克莱夫•哈姆比(Clive Humby)在2006年最早提出：“数据是新时代的石油”(data is the new oil)。但这个充斥着Fog Data Science之类私人公司的市场非常不透明。我们的个人信息为支撑整个互联网的数字广告行业提供燃料。被监控为我们换来的是定向广告和免费在线服务。而没有为我们换来的，是清晰的定价机制。

Untangling individual data sales is difficult. Payment offers can therefore seem arbitrary. Prior to 2019, Facebook was reported to have paid some teenagers up to $20 per month to track their online habits. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin offers about 25 tokens to those willing to have their eyeballs scanned by the biometric cryptocurrency company. This works out to less than $40. If you want an indication of how cavalier we have become about personal data, Worldcoin says it has already verified more than 12mn people.

想要弄清楚个人数据的销售过程很困难。因此，对个人数据的报价往往显得随意。在2019年之前，据报道，Facebook曾向一些青少年支付每月最高20美元的费用，换取他们允许Facebook追踪他们的上网习惯。萨姆•奥尔特曼(Sam Altman)的Worldcoin承诺，如果愿意让这家生物识别加密货币公司扫描眼球，它愿意支付约25枚代币，折合不到40美元。如果你想知道我们已经多不把个人数据当一回事，这是一个证据：Worldcoin表示已有超过1200万人接受了它的扫描验证。

Perhaps take-up is high because paid deals are rare. The Generation Lab’s co-founder Cyrus Beschloss says it has installed fewer than 1,000 phone trackers so far but received a lot more interest. Respondents liked the fact that the trade-off was explicit. Still, he acknowledges that some of the data being collected is more valuable than the price paid.

参与度之高或许是因为很少公司愿意付费。The Generation Lab的联合创始人西鲁斯•贝施洛斯(Cyrus Beschloss)表示，它迄今只安装了不到1000个手机追踪器，但表示有兴趣的人远远更多。受访者喜欢这种明码标价的交换。不过，他也承认，该公司收集到的某些数据的价值远高于支付的价格。

The problem with pricing data is that its value is variable. Phone numbers are relatively easy to access and not worth much. A 2023 study by law professor Justin Sherman at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy found that this sort of data about US military personnel was on sale for as little as 12 cents per person.

给数据定价的难点在于数据的价值是可变的。电话号码相对容易获取，价值不高。杜克大学(Duke University)桑福德公共政策学院(Sanford School of Public Policy)法学教授贾斯廷•舍曼(Justin Sherman)在2023年的一项研究中发现，关于美国军方人员的此类数据售价低至每人12美分。

Location and health data are more difficult to obtain and so more valuable — especially when bundled up with thousands of other people’s. It depends who the buyer is too — whether another broker, ad tech company, law enforcement agency or government department. The Generation Lab says hedge funds have been particularly interested in the information that it is collecting.

定位数据和健康数据则更难获取，因此更有价值——尤其是将成千上万人的此类数据打包在一起时。买家是谁也很重要——是另一家数据中介、广告技术公司、执法机构，还是政府部门。The Generation Lab表示，对该公司收集到的信息尤其感兴趣的是对冲基金。

All of this is above board. If you let an app track you and the app lets brokers buy the data then it’s fair game. In Europe, internet users must be notified about data collection and offered opt-outs (though these can be complicated). In the US, there is no federal privacy law.

这一切都是摆在明面上的。如果你允许一个应用追踪你，而该应用允许数据中介购买收集到的数据，那么这个游戏就是公平的。在欧洲，收集网络用户的数据必须提前告知，并提供让用户退出数据收集的选项（尽管退出操作可能很复杂）。在美国，没有联邦层面的隐私法。

Still, efforts to make data transactions more transparent are in the works. California governor Gavin Newsom once suggested that tech companies pay residents a “data dividend”. And US regulators have started to target brokers such as Outlogic (which began life as an app that stopped people sending drunk texts) to stop them from selling sensitive location data. Sherman says this is partly driven by concern about sales to rivals such as China.

不过，让数据交易更透明的努力正在进行中。加州州长加文•纽瑟姆(Gavin Newsom)曾建议科技公司向居民支付“数据红利”。美国监管机构也开始盯上像 Outlogic（它最初是一款防止人们在醉酒后发送短信的应用）这样的数据中介，以防止它们出售敏感的定位数据。舍曼表示，这样做的部分原因是出于对相关数据可能被出售给中国等竞争对手的担忧。

These sorts of concerns will help campaigners who want data brokers to be more clear about exactly what they collect, how much they sell it for and who to.

对于那些希望数据中介更加清楚地说明他们到底收集了什么、卖了多少钱、卖给谁的活动人士而言，此类担忧是有益的。

Right now, $50 is a good deal because we lack the knowledge to come up with a more accurate price for personal information. But like oil, data is not a one-off extraction. Even if you’ve unwittingly handed out vast quantities already, there is always more to bargain with.

目前来说，50美元算是一笔不错的交易，因为我们缺乏相关知识来为个人信息制定一个更准确的价格。但就像石油一样，数据的开采并不是一次性的。即便你已经在不知不觉间交出了大量数据，仍然总有更多数据可以拿来讨价还价。

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