But if you are so dumb as to not know your data us harvested, you are a great gullible idiot, er, I mean customer.
I don't think logic holds any water. There is no rational 'free market' reason you can't sell your data, it's just logistically too difficult to deal with millions of individual 'sellers' istead of paying $supplier to get all of it at once.
2) Even if the data is being harvested, doesn't mean that there is any morality in trying to get a share of the profits. That doesn't make you smart, it makes you a cheap accomplice.
3) "free market" would apply only if all exchanged data were offered by those that own the data, and if they could determine how and when the data could be used. GDPR has shown already that some sites would rather not serve their sites to European citizens than comply with data regulations. You can bet that the intersection of high-value prospects who would be interested in selling their data for some meager dollars/year is very, very small.
You can buy discounted TVs (and in some places they are the only TVs you can buy), which clearly have advertisements on them that others do not.
When more people wake up my bet is they will be accustomed to advertising, they will just want better advertising. And if one can get paid for receiving short-form entertainment with relevant product information, with appropriate branding I bet there is a market.
Brave's model has shown that you can have a ad distribution system that gives more power to the users, the ads are still relevant, fraud is much more easily detected and it can still reward the users for their attention.
With zero knowledge proofs, you can even have a system where the advertisers only get to show ads for those that match certain criteria, but no personal data needs to be given away.
If you are working on anything that depends on direct exploitation of user data, I urge to go back to the drawing board and seriously consider the morality of it.
No one is set up to explicitly monetize your data with consent. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea once society catches up with it.
Monetizing users' attention is enough.
Look at the Brave model. People get paid for the ads, no personal data is exchanged.
Though I think “high-value bit of cattle” or “high-value mark” are closer to how the stalking side of the advertising industry sees us!
I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.