Skip to Content

Datacoup Wants to Buy Your Credit Card and Facebook Data

Datacoup will pay for your online data, then use it to provide insights on consumer behavior.
September 8, 2014

Datacoup, one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data, has finished a closed trial of its service and is now opening it to anyone (see “Sell Your Personal Data for $8 a Month”).

Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts, credit card transaction records, and other personal information, and will sell insights gleaned from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior. Talks are in progress with major consumer brands and financial institutions, says Matt Hogan, CEO of the startup.

Whether an individual user gets the full $10 a month or not depends on which streams of data he’s willing to share. Options include debit card and credit card transactions, and data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Datacoup won’t provide raw data to companies. Instead, it will provide results of analyses performed on that data. For example, a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.

Donald Waldman, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado, says services like Datacoup may provide useful insights about the perceived value of privacy. “The fact that people do value their information seems obvious, but the question is, how much do they value it?” he says.

Data streams like those that Datacoup collects could turn out to be worth more than $10 a month. Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones, tablets, and PCs (see “How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?”).

Hogan expects the price that Datacoup offers people for their data to change as his company assesses the supply of customer information and demand from companies willing to pay for analyses of that data. “The market will decide,” he says.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.