German people value their private data more than Americans

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How much money would you want Facebook to pay you for sharing your data? A recent study by the US-based Technology Policy Institute looked into six countries - the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina, in order to determine how much personal privacy is worth to their citizens, reports Reuters.

The study is focused on how much people would want to be paid to allow companies to share their private data. Apparently, among the studied countries, German people have the highest estimation of how much their data is worth. They would want Facebook to pay them around $8 every month in order to share their contact information, while Americans would only want around half of that, $3.50.

The financial information was considered the most expensive in all the studied countries, as well as biometric information, such as fingerprint data. On average, social media platforms would have to pay customers a monthly $8.44 fee to share bank information, $7.56 for fingerprint data, $6.05 to read personal texts and $5.80 to share cash withdrawal information.

Location data is found to be the least valuable as the research shows that people would want only $1.82 on average for its sharing… and surprisingly would want nothing for the annoyance of receiving ads via text message.

Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at TPI, told Reuters that the differences, shown by the study, mean that people in different countries would want different levels of austerity in data governance rules. He added that quantifying the value of privacy is important for analysis and research into privacy policies and rules.