I recently signed up with datacoup.com after reading about it in, if I recall correctly, MIT’s Technology Review (an awesome publication if you haven’t heard of it already). Datacoup allows you to link your social media accounts, credit/debit card accounts, and more in return for a monthly payout. Datacoup sells your personal data and deposits a portion of their proceeds into your PayPal account. Acknowledging that I’d, thus far, received no direct financial compensation for the commodity that is my personal data, I decided to give it a try and find out how much I might recoup.
STATUS
So far, despite the original estimate of $1.78/week per Datacoup after linking 9 of the 11 possible accounts, I’ve received one payout (one month’s worth of personal data sales) of $5.34. (As stated, this payout didn’t include the linkage of all 11 possible accounts- however, after linking all possible accounts subsequent to the first payout, the estimated payout is not much more than the original estimate for 9 linked accounts.)
CURRENT OPINION
Though I’m getting paid for something now that I was not before, these are still paltry numbers in exchange for the time it takes to link each of the 11 possible accounts.
It’s also of question why I outrank each of the three founders in terms of # accounts and # active data attributes (see below). (Datacoup has provided no response as of this writing.)
Founders’ data profiles:
