Do companies sell my data?
Often, not in the way people imagine. Large platforms usually do not hand a file labelled “your data” to a stranger for cash. They use what they know about you — what you click, where you go, what you buy, who you know — to show you adverts someone else pays for.
You are the audience. Advertisers are the customer. Your attention and your behaviour are the product being refined and priced.
How the advertising model works
When you use a free app, you are typically paying with data and attention instead of a subscription. The company builds a profile, matches you to advertisers, and charges those advertisers for reach and results.
Privacy policies and regulators matter here: in many places you have rights to access, correct or delete data. But the business model — fund the service by monetising users — is decades old, just vastly more precise now.
Location history, purchase records, likes, dwell time, and messages to friends all feed models that predict what you might buy next. The better the prediction, the more an advertiser will pay for your impression.
What one platform earned per person
To see scale, take a public example. Meta reported about US$201 billion of revenue and about US$60 billion of net income in 2025, with roughly 3.58 billion people using its apps each day. That is about US$56 of revenue per daily user in a year, and about US$17 of profit — before the company reinvests, pays staff or pays tax.
Your “worth” to that firm in a given year is in that ballpark — not because you received $56, but because your use helped generate it. Multiply by billions of users and you see why attention is one of the world’s largest markets.
Data as work, not a free gift
Economists Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl argue that data should be treated more like labour: people produce it, and they should share in the value it creates rather than give it away by default.
That reframes the question. It is not only “how much is my data worth on the open market?” but “who keeps the value my data helps generate?” Today, mostly not you.
What you can do — and what Huntos is not
Practical steps: use privacy settings, choose paid services where you can, support laws that give you control, and be sceptical of apps that ask for more than they need.
You can also ask who profits when you “agree” to terms you did not read. That question is the beginning of economic literacy in a digital economy.
Huntos does not buy your data and does not sell it. It is building a shareholder register — one share per adult, the same for all — so that value people create together can, in principle, flow to owners rather than only to platforms. Huntos is in formation, unlicensed as a financial firm, has never paid a dividend, and will never ask for your card or password. The full valuation sources are at huntos.hn/value.