Money Walks: A Human-Centric Study on the Economics of Personal Mobile Data
This addresses the problem of understanding user-centric valuation of personal data for mobile app developers and data market designers, though it is incremental in nature.
The study investigated how users value their personal mobile data, finding that location information is the most sensitive and valued category, with statistically significant links between usage, personal dispositions, and bidding behavior.
In the context of a myriad of mobile apps which collect personally identifiable information (PII) and a prospective market place of personal data, we investigate a user-centric monetary valuation of mobile PII. During a 6-week long user study in a living lab deployment with 60 participants, we collected their daily valuations of 4 categories of mobile PII (communication, e.g. phonecalls made/received, applications, e.g. time spent on different apps, location and media, photos taken) at three levels of complexity (individual data points, aggregated statistics and processed, i.e. meaningful interpretations of the data). In order to obtain honest valuations, we employ a reverse second price auction mechanism. Our findings show that the most sensitive and valued category of personal information is location. We report statistically significant associations between actual mobile usage, personal dispositions, and bidding behavior. Finally, we outline key implications for the design of mobile services and future markets of personal data.