Would You Let Companies Monitor You For Money?

In the smart home of the (not-so-distant) future, sensors will record and process occupants’ every coming and going. Opened the fridge at 3 am? Noted. Washing machine hasn’t run in weeks? Your house knows. Daily habits, mealtimes, bedtime? All on file. That’s a lot of information, and the majority of people polled in a survey say they’d be very worried about hackers and criminals gaining access to their (hypothetical) smart-home data. But that doesn’t mean they’d want to keep that data to themselves. In fact, just over half of the 9,000 people surveyed worldwide said they’d share data about themselves with companies in exchange for cash. The survey was conducted last summer by Vanson Bourne, a technology-research company, on behalf of Intel Security.

In a way, its results represent the logical next step in the evolution of people’s relationship with data about themselves. For a while now, technology users have become increasingly comfortable trading their personal data for free services. “I use Gmail for free, but I know that Google will capture some information in return,” a respondent told Pew researchers in a privacy study earlier in 2016. “I’m fine with that.” If that’s the data-barter economy—give up your personal data and get convenient services in return—then we’re seeing the start of data as currency: Give up your personal data and you’ll be rewarded in actual dollars. For many, that’s a freeing prospect. It imbues the murky data-exchange process with a new transparency, and gives consumers more agency in deciding what to offer up and what to protect.