It's not worthless to companies who want to use it against me.

I don't want to sell my data. I want companies to stop collecting it.

In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone here wishing they could sell their data.

The data of an individual may be worth something like $0.001 which is not that much to an individual.

However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast

There are companies like Nielsen that will pay you directly for you to provide personal data. But regardless of that, there are plenty of things that we do for free, like babysitting our own kids or answering our own phones, that if provided to someone else we would get paid for. So if your data is worthless to you, that doesn't mean it's not valuable to someone else. And we know for a fact that data is valuable, so why are you even raising this point, except to be argumentative for its own sake?

So in this transaction you’re exchanging something that is individually worthless for something that is individually valuable.

Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!

Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free

It’s really hard for me to take you seriously. You’re just poorly playing semantics to white knight for Google.

Very weird.

It’s a good deal for the individual, that’s why Gmail is popular.

Trading something of low value for something of moderate value is not what “free” means…

Say the data from me or any of my peers was worth 1/100th of a cent and we give that away… that means I am trading something of minor value for something else…