Hear Me Out: What If We Got Paid For the Data We Share? It’s not like corporations aren’t already extracting it for free. Take job applications, for example. Resumes are incredibly data-rich, companies can store that information in massive databases that become valuable over time. The current system has normalized and incentivized this kind of large-scale data collection. So why shouldn’t the data we share have an actual price attached to it? It clearly has economic value.