Complacent Marketing
Should Consumers Be Compensated For Their Data?
By Diana Obath
Every time someone scrolls through a feed, sends a message to a friend, or makes a purchase online, a trail of data is left behind. That data does not simply vanish. It is collected, analysed, and sold. It is fed into algorithms that decide what advertising a person will see, what products are designed, and even how prices are set. The companies that gather and process this information earn huge sums of money. The people who generate it earn nothing.
This imbalance is the lifeblood of the modern digital economy. Consumers are treated as suppliers of raw material but remain excluded from the value chain. In almost every other form of exchange, the supplier of a resource is compensated. Farmers are paid for their crops, miners for their extract, workers for their labour. Data is different. People provide it
constantly, often without realising it, but the return flows in only one direction.
How different would the digital world be if consumers were compensated for their data? This is not a sentimental argument but one based on value. Information has become more valuable than many physical commodities. It fuels entire industries and drives decisions at every level of commerce and governance. Retailers use it to predict demand, hospitals to plan treatments, transport providers to optimise routes. Without data, the machinery of modern life would stutter. Yet the people whose daily actions supply this fuel are cut out of the rewards.
Consider how obvious the imbalance looks when compared with other resources. When Apple sells a phone, it is paid for the product it has manufactured.
When Meta, which owns WhatsApp, sells advertising targeted with personal data, it is also profiting from a resource. The difference is that Apple is paid by its customers while Meta is paid by its advertisers. The customer who produced the information enabling the advertising is left unrewarded. The resource has been taken for free.
Compensation changes this dynamic. It turns a hidden extraction into a transaction. Once money is involved, companies must explain what data they are collecting and why they need it. Consumers gain a clearer understanding of the value of what they provide, and companies are required to recognise that value in return. Such transparency improves trust, which in turn encourages people to share more accurate information. Accurate data leads to stronger insights, better services, and ultimately more sustainable relationships between businesses and their customers.
Data is too important to be left as a free resource for corporations. It is time for consumers to be recognised and rewarded as the true suppliers of this modern raw material. Compensating consumers would not only bring fairness to the exchange but also secure the trust on which the entire system depends. Without that trust, the data economy will continue to face suspicion and resistance.
Governments are already moving in this direction by imposing stricter rules on the use of personal information. Privacy regulations in Europe and in many other regions have established that companies cannot simply collect whatever they like and do with it as they please. They must gain consent, they must allow deletion, and they must explain what they are doing. Offering compensation would go further. It would show that companies understand not just the letter of the law but the principle of fairness that lies behind it.
When WhatsApp announced an update to its privacy policy that allowed greater sharing of data with Meta, users reacted
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