A user-centric approach to pricing information

Organizations and businesses have realized that their profits lie in utilizing the power of big data which is available freely, making it the most valuable asset for an organization to possess. Armed with this awareness, data brokers, the people who collect this information and present it in neat bundles for prospective buyers, are exploiting this resource at the cost of the common internet users, to whom this resource belongs. These users stand to lose out the most, with not only loss of privacy, but also on the possible monetization of this information. We believe that one of the most important reasons behind this is the lack of awareness among the users. Towards this purpose, in this paper, we have outlined a model, based on Shannons information theory, which can be used by users to put a value to their information. We have also introduced the idea of obfuscation of user information to protect user privacy. Using our model, users can valuate their big data and put a price to it, thus giving them more power and control over their own information. Our model also incorporates the fundamental economic idea of demand, thus providing a fair and transparent mechanism for both parties to conduct business in the internet information market.