Exploited and Underutilized: Canada's Broken Data Economy

When the Shield team was writing Chapter 4 of Foundations of Digital Sovereignty about data, we kept trying to answer a seemingly simple question: How much is Canada’s data worth?

We did a lot of digging, but we never came up with a good answer.

The truth is, the value of data depends entirely on context.

One context we can look at is from Meta’s publicly reported financial statements. In 2025, the average revenue per user was US$57.03.

If you’re a Canadian, you’re probably worth a bit more than average to Meta. But even if we’re generous, would you say that all of the surveillance, all the data they collect, the relentless tracking, and targeted advertising is worth … a hundred bucks?

The value from Meta’s point of view is different. Any one user is only worth a handful of dollars. But in aggregate, across roughly 3.5 billion users, it all adds up to US$60 billion in profit in 2025, at around a 40% operating profit margin.

This is the value of data in surveillance capitalism in a nutshell; individual posts, likes, messages, memes, interests, inferred sexual preferences, buying decisions, and so on are all worth very little, but the companies collect so much in their dragnet that the overall value becomes wildly lucrative.

It’s worth pausing here to note that Meta doesn’t sell data, as such. The company hoards data, and then monetizes it by giving carefully mediated access to advertisers.

But there are other contexts that you can think about, to value data.

If somebody hijacked your Google Photos or Apple Photos account, and was threatening to delete all of your photos, how much would you pay to save those precious memories?

Everyone’s answer is probably different, but I’ll bet that your number is more than $57.03.

Corporations have to make exactly this sort of calculation. We don’t know how much education technology company Canvas paid hackers to get them to delete 3.75 TB of data that was stolen — information about 9,000 schools and 275 million students.

But they definitely paid something. Probably less than $57.03 per student, but … the context is different.

So then, what is the context of Canada’s data? What is the value of it?

Canada’s data is simultaneously exploited and underutilized.

Foreign platforms extract value from Canadian personal and behavioural data, while high-value institutional data such as health, research, environmental, geological, agricultural, financial, and public-sector data often remains fragmented, inaccessible, or poorly governed.

We would (rightly) be up in arms if Canadian health care providers announced that they were planning on turning over patient data to tech companies for commercial purposes.

But the reason why that would be so reprehensible is because we have a pretty good idea of how that data might be used. We are so inured to being exploited and targeted by companies using our own data against us, of course we would expect more of the same.

The solution is to change the context.

In Chapter 4 of Foundations of Digital Sovereignty we take a look at data governance.

Canada needs much stronger privacy laws to govern the digital realm. Is anybody happy with the all-or-nothing surveillance capitalism that we all live with today?

Our governments are hesitant to clamp down because they worry about stifling innovation and economic opportunity, but that’s accepting the reality of a bad context, trying to play a losing game that the big foreign hyperscalers have already won.

With rigorous privacy laws that protect Canadians’ rights, and build trust for Canadian digital systems, we can build the trust and social licence to unlock more Canadian data for beneficial public use — including projects that benefit the Canadian economy.

Read more about the privacy reforms, and the National Data Trust, that we are proposing, if Canada takes meaningful steps to govern the flows of data in the digital economy.