Blockchain technology has taken the world by storm, attracting exorbitant attention from all spheres, from software and app development to the food industry, in part due to its potential to revolutionize data marketplaces. Indeed, when we consider the sheer ubiquity of Internet applications present in many aspects of modern day lives, and the critical roles they place, in life and in business, it is clear that the creation of a secure, high-performance IT infrastructure is more than necessary, but truly crucial. The move to the knowledge based, data driven economy, however, raises many key concerns regarding the monetization of private data, especially concerning who profits from these pools of personal data, and who owns and has control over personal save data by cybersecurity companies louisville ky.
THE ISSUE WITH THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
We expect that companies will use personal data with care, however, that is not often the case. While we use social media companies for “free” we actually are selling them our data. They then sell this to advertisers, and these social networks moguls earn an enormous amount of money, while users are left in the dark about the specifics of where their data ends up, or how it’s being used.
Indeed, users of Facebook, Amazon Google, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube and similar social create excess of up to over 2000 USD alone, just from the direct access from their personal data. And yet, it is the companies that monetize this data, and not the users themselves, and when the data is connected in the form of a “worldwide data market enabled by various data brokers that collect all types of personal data from various databases”, the more money is derived. Smartphones and the internet have made this data more readily available and abundant, in which the danger lies for users. Thus, one of the main issues with current data marketplaces is that there is a lack of accountability, and no trusted track record in handling private data responsibly, as users have few rights to their personal data.
This trend of the monetization of data is set to increase, rather than decrease, as data exchange centers are multiplying, with over 270 prominent data brokers already existing to collect all types of personal data, such as loyalty cards data, buying habits and preferences, and sell itBut there are key factors missing in this equation: transparency and trust, as users have little idea .
How their personal data is used, and to what end. Data can be sold to any entity, untrustworthy or not, and users have very little clue about how their data is being used. For example, when we take into account how Uber utilized the startup unroll.me to secretly reading people’s Gmail to pilfer Lyft receipts data in order to gain competitive intelligence or how the credit reporting agency Equifax recently suffered a data breach which affected over 143 million users, attackers getting hold of the names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses of users, further fueling fraud and identity theft, we see how the centralization of control of private data, leaves much to be desired. For example, the consumer Blockchain solutions like Datum, combine methods of encryption to make breaches more difficult for attackers since as the single point of failure is thus eliminated.
WHO REALLY OWNS YOUR DATA?
Not the users, although they think they do. Current data marketplaces, which hold the personal data of millions of users, hold clients data under restrictive licensing terms, whereby a user is effectively giving away the majority of their rights to their image when posting it on Instagram, for example. Users are able to see or attach their own specific terms of user for how their data is used, and gain no profit. Large scale co-operations, on the other hand, have no qualms collecting data from their millions of users to reap profit, and indeed, the raw data can value a range from a hundred cents to over a hundred dollars per individual.
The platform endeavors to address this crucial issue of companies profiting from users personal data by putting “power back into the hands of people by providing them with a marketplace to help them share or sell the data stored in its decentralized database on their own terms”. The company strives to answer the question of retaining client privacy, and redistributing profit. And, by, focusing on data part of a key/value pairs, they can thus ensure that the decentralized models of the availability, latency and searchability of client data is preserved, and duly rewarded. Crucially, their model puts users first by putting it down to the individual to grant access to their data, allowing for credibility, accountability, and choice, in a marketplace where these factors are sorely lacking.
Under the Datum model, users regain control over how their data gets used and shared. Datum endeavors to act as a “secure and decentralized alternative”, and under its open source and free to participate, fees would be paid to store data, access stored data and rewards are paid out for submitting data. Each piece of user data would be marked with usage terms during encryption, so that way clients and users can control the specific ways in which their data is being shared and used. This enables a sense of full control over the whom and how to share data, and are further able to fine tune their privacy settings to “share disabled, “share with identified and known data consumers, “share with specific, identified and known data consumers for a minimum fee, “share with everyone, and “share with everyone for a minimum fee”.
In an information driven age, the need for a truly decentralized marketplace has the potential to lead to a world where power is put back in the hands of the customers, a world where customers are better informed, and data driven companies more accountable to consumers, the middle man entirely eliminated. And wouldn’t that be a better world for all?
