We investigate and rationalize how individuals in a surveilled developing economic society value a human-centric data economy (HCDE). We first design and conduct a non-online pilot field experiment on approximately 22500 human subjects across India from 2014–2019, and collect data reflecting the impact of monetary incentives on these subjects to voluntarily trade their (personal) data in the digital surveillance age. Consequently, we study how various degrees of incentive influence subject preferences - both, when they are, or are not well-informed about the commercial malpractices their personal data might be subjected to. We analyze and rationalize two main observations in general for the Indian population: (i) despite being warned of the commercial malpractices associated with their personal data in the mobile and IoT age, they prefer to trade data for incentives, and (ii) the willingness of individuals to trade personal data is statistically heavy-tailed, and hints at following a weak power-law.