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by flagrant_taco 982 days ago
Individual data is extremely valuable, they wouldn't collect and store it individually if all they wanted was the aggregate.

Identity-specific data is sold all the time for everything from advertising to credit scores and what would otherwise be called social credit scores of they were run by the government instead of private companies.
1 comments
RandomLensman 982 days ago
It really isn't on average. An individual dataset is usually cheap - or are you saying there is a mispricing?
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flagrant_taco 982 days ago
I'm not really sure what would be considered cheap vs valuable here so I don't have a great answer there. My point was only that individusl data is collected and sold often, it must be valuable or there wouldn't be a market.

I'd be curious to see how the price compares when selling 10k individuals' data versus aggregate data the 10k people. Presumably if it was cheaper to buy all the individual data I would do that and aggregate it myself.

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leplen 982 days ago
The data is only useful in aggregate, but different people/use cases require different types of aggregations. Using pre-aggregated data is difficult, because it almost certainly hasn't been aggregated in the way that's convenient for whatever analysis you're trying to do with it.
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flagrant_taco 982 days ago
The aggregate data is often more useful in commercial use cases, but plenty of use cases need the indivual data as well.

Private investigators, three letter agencies, and any company wanting to send mailers to my new address when I move all need the individual data to target me specifically.

I totally agree the aggregate data is given more value in a commercial market heavily focused on advertising and now training LLMs, my only point was that there are markets that highly value individual data as well.

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danenania 982 days ago
Sure, it is fractionally "valuable" in the sense that it is worth some tiny percentage of the large datasets it belongs to that get purchased for significant amounts.

I think the point stands that it wouldn't be easy to sell your individual data, and even if you could, it would be for a pittance from someone who is looking to build a large dataset. They certainly wouldn't be giving you an amount that justifies advice like "hold on to your data".

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CuriouslyC 982 days ago
The data is also useful individually. Jewish and single? Try JDate.
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