How much is your data worth?

“I applaud this Legislature for passing the first-in-the-nation digital privacy law,” he said in the speech. “But California’s consumers should also be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data. And so, I’ve asked my team to develop a proposal for a new data dividend for Californians.”

It is not a totally new concept and the particulars have yet to be decided.

Still, it seems as if every day, a new symptom of tech-driven inequality emerges. And the idea that the companies profiting most from consumers’ personal information should be forced to share the bounty holds an obvious appeal.

“What I’m ecstatic about is that one of the challenges in government is we’re generally slow and look backward — we don’t look forward,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, a co-author of the California Consumer Privacy Act, told me recently. “And this gives us an opportunity to do that in a very big way.”

The thing is, there is a huge range of ways a digital dividend could actually be structured.

It could, for instance, be a straightforward payment or reward for consumers in exchange for the use of their data. Though that is an idea that has raised concerns among privacy advocates who worry such a model could make privacy even more of a luxury, accessible only to those who can afford to opt out of selling their data.

Or, it could be a “dividend” in the broader sense, in which companies are essentially taxed for the data they collect.

And no matter the model, experts told me the idea of a digital or privacy dividend hinges on a more fundamental question: How much is your data worth?

That is something Dominique Shelton Leipzig, a Los Angeles-based partner with the law firm Perkins Coie who specializes in privacy and security, said she has been urging businesses and regulators to think more about — and quickly.

“At this point in time, there’s just no such thing as a company that is not heavily reliant on their data,” she told me. “It’s just not being tracked the way any other asset would be.”

Shelton Leipzig said many big companies — ones that you would not think of as tech companies — have tended to look at data security as separate from their core business. They do not look at their customer data as a tangible asset, she said, in the same way they might look at real estate, say, or their inventory.

Part of the difficulty, said Christopher Armstrong, a managing director with the consulting firm KPMG, is that there are not well-established ways of figuring out the value of customer data to different companies. How much is it worth on its own, or collectively, or in conjunction with a company’s technology?

A standard method would at least give businesses and regulators a common framework.

For now, Armstrong said, “it seems like there’s a lack of clarity and quite a bit of discretion.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.