(via rickwebb)

No doubt, Google and Facebook are collecting our personal data at a pace we’ve never seen. But, this “Arkansas company you’ve probably never heard of knows more about you than some of your friends, Google, and even the FBI — and it’s selling your data.”

…Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year. “In essence, it’s as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined, and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge,” says The Times’ Singer.

What is social data worth? And, how social data is valued? Take a look at this detailed infographic where Backupify plotted the data in two different ways »

The first is by average per-user value, which of course has Facebook as king of the hill. The second plot shows how many users a service would require to reach a $10 billion valuation. As you can see, most of the companies are unlikely to ever get that big.