It feels free. It never costs you a penny. You search for a recipe. You check your email. You post a meme.
Then the machines look on.
According to new analysis by the Web3 Foundation, the average British internet user generates roughly £194,001 in commercial value for tech firms over their lifetime. That figure isn’t a bill. It is the price of your existence in data form. Inflation-linked. Extracted silently.
People should be aware that their data is being monitored, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. It is not a mystery. It is a business model.
Bill Laboon from the foundation put it bluntly. He noted that users rarely grasp the scope of it. You think you are just using a spell-checker or chatting with ChatGPT.
In reality?
You are training the machine.
Traditional cookie-tracking feels like a dirty secret from 2012. The new play is aggregation. Giants are harvesting your digital footprint—location pings, search history, uploaded images—and feeding it to AI models. The “classic” use of data for ads is now overshadowed by its role as fuel for artificial intelligence.
Which is more disturbing? The ad for shoes you didn’t buy. Or the neural network that knows how you speak.
The report highlights major players like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Anthropic. These firms could theoretically earn up to £1,042 per year from a single user. That sounds like a lot until you consider the valuation of the companies sitting on that data. Nvidia hit five trillion US dollars recently. Microsoft and Apple passed four.
The wealth isn’t trickling down to the user. It is flowing into servers.
Laboon warns that this opacity is dangerous. As AI accelerates, data becomes the resource. The current setup is broken because no one gets a receipt for the value they create. We just get targeted ads. And maybe a slower computer.
A user-led internet would demand transparency. It would ask for ownership.
Right now? We just scroll. And the value accumulates in someone else’s pocket.
