Personal Information Is the Currency of the 21st Century

[Commentary] The currency of the 21st century digital economy is your personal information. It has no transaction costs and does not decrease in value when the supply increases. Contrary to the laws of economics, it may even increase in value with greater supply. The more information you provide to companies, the more value they can extract from it. Now that 21st century digital behemoths such as Facebook and Google have discovered how to make personal information the most valuable resource in the history of humanity, they are strip-mining mountains of it into completely unrecognizable states. Conversely, we tend to ignore this process because the most magnificent, technologically advanced and socially connected digital city is being built from it.

[Tom Cochran is CTO at Atlantic Media, publisher of the Atlantic, Quartz, National Journal and Government Executive]