And even if giving our digital detritus a dollar amount did increase our ability to resist privacy policies, there’s no consensus on how to calculate value. Given the convoluted nature of the digital ad world, where data is transferred and acquired frequently, it’s not clear how companies would value shared information between parties. As a former Facebook advertising manager, Antonio Garcia Martinez, argued on Twitter recently, “Data’s value is also a function of that company’s ability to monetize it. My address and purchase history is worth a lot to an e-commerce company, nothing to a health care company.”

Perhaps bleakest of all is the notion that our data isn’t worth very much when it stands alone. Back-of-the-envelope math by one blogger put the yearly value of an internet user’s data at “approximately $240 per capita” using advertising industry statistics from 2016. That’s not nothing, but it’s also slightly distressing that the sum of our digital lives is worth roughly half of a yearly subscription to the Cheese of the Month club.

The well-intentioned bipartisan bill seems to ignore the architecture of the modern internet economy. For many companies, the data is valuable only in the aggregate, where it can inform machine-learning systems that feed users recommendations, power the applications and inform internal strategy for the future. In the world of digital marketing, where more than 7,000 companies slice, track, retarget and bid on your information, the value of your data for one tech conglomerate can change based on the data that other companies have collected. As one ad industry veteran put it to me recently, “the ecosystem that deals in our data is so convoluted that almost nobody can see the whole thing and nobody understands it all.” How do you begin to assign value to that?

To be fair, the proposed legislation does include some meaningful steps toward transparency such as requiring companies with over 100 million users to “disclose types of data collected.” It’s possible that a truly comprehensive list of every piece of data captured about you from every entity would meaningfully alter how we see and use online services. But good luck prying that information from every shady app and data broker.