Paying for services with your data

Personally, I find it quite exciting that some of the technologies that I used to imagine are now making their appearances into reality. Things like real-time translation, image and face recognition, voice command interaction, these are all now possible and improving vastly with the increasingly powerful supercomputing capabilities over the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done remotely by large machines elsewhere and the result is sent directly to your mobile devices with minimum delays.

In this new era, there may be a new currency emerging -data. The collective data we all give away by using these free services may be even more valuable than any money that we would be willing to offer. Is this a fair price to pay? It seems that most users think so when they use Google (or Apple, or Yahoo, Or Facebook, Twitter...).