“Have you wondered how much money you are making for Facebook spending all that time looking at pictures of your friends or posting BuzzFeed quizzes about which ‘Game of Thrones’ character you like the most?”
This is how Cotton Delo of AdAge begins the story about PrivacyFix, an app developed by VG which can calculate how much Google and Facebook bill for each user.
The account is based on officially available data released by these companies and also on each person’s profile. For Facebook, the app takes into account the user’s activity such as the number of likes, posts and photos as well as the number of friends. For Google, what matters is the volume of searches performed in the last 60 days,
The search engine charges advertisers for clicks on advertising data. Using the app, Cotton Delo figured she earns $20.75 (Dh76.21) for Facebook and $223 for Google. (The numbers, of course, are estimates.)
The most valuable woman user on Facebook yielded $37.98 annually for Facebook, while it was $30.38 with the man. On the other end of the scale, the lowest contributions from a woman and man were $17.02 and $13.61 respectively.
If you were curious about how much your data is worth, do a quick test on AVG PrivacyFix. You must first install the application, available on Android and iOS, and as an extension for Chrome and Firefox. Upon entering the home screen, just click on the button that reads ‘Get AVG PrivacyFix for free’.
The programme also has a category showing which tech companies are tracking you online. You can prevent tracing all at once by clicking “Fix”, or select which companies you want to block.