MIT Technology Review reports on Datacoup, a company running a beta trial offering consumers money in exchange for access to their online habits. For $8 a month, users allow the company access to a combination of their social media accounts and the feed of their credit and debit card transactions. Datacoup plans on turning a profit by offering businesses access to mined, anonymized data. CEO Matt Hogan said, “If a consumer wants to make an educated decision, they should be able to sell their data to who they want.” Carnegie Mellon’s Alessandro Acquisti cautions that Datacoup doesn’t really give consumers control of their data because social media and financial sites still retain it, and consumers get money now, but may regret it later. “Measuring privacy trade-offs is exceedingly hard,” Acquisti added.
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