Introduction to Measurable Data Token(1/5) — Your Data should be Making Money for you
Your Data should be Making Money for you
Today, most service providers collect users’ data with no intention to disclose the reason and the intrinsic economic value, meanwhile, users trade their data unconsciously in exchange for a free app or service.
Take Google as an example. When you first sign up for a Google account, Google attempts to collect your name, email address, password, date of birth, gender, telephone and address (Google Privacy 2017). These information help Google know more about their users, thus enabling the company to push more relevant content or advertising to users. When you use a Google account, it collects the emails you send and receive from Gmail, the contacts and calendar events you add, the photos and videos you upload, the Docs, Sheets, and Slides you author, all in pursuit of enhancing the product experience and generating profits. As a huge entity with a wide variety of services, Google does not typically share its information to a third party simply to marginally increase profits, since users’ data for its own sake is very helpful for the company.
Location based service Foursquare is another example of tech companies collecting data. They store and analyze users’ data for Business Insights. Since the main feature of this service is to allow users to share their location as a social media post, Foursquare frequently stores user’s’ location data. In early 2016, the company released an in-house big data product called Foursquare Location Intelligence on the basis of all the user location data they have collected. Soon thereafter, they released a report predicting that, according to the data they have, sales of the famous American food chain Chipotle (a publicly-listed company) would drop 30% in Q1.
Even though Foursquare collects location data which seems to be quite personal, it’s not actually Personally Identifiable Information (PII). They know fewer users stepped into a restaurant one month compared to the previous month, but they do not know the identity of those people, because this information is irrelevant in a big data product. Although it’s inevitable that companies will eventually mine sensitive data for profits, the current reality is that most tech companies and products do not trade users’ PII data.
While internet users knowingly allow their data to be collected, they are typically unaware of the uses for that data, which leads to insecurity and suspicion. This suspicion about the services they use online has led some to block Cookies tracking and ads online to protect themselves.
From 2015 to 2016, the number of users using ad-blockers on either desktop or mobile surged to a new high (PageFair 2017 Adblocking Report). Even prestigious companies like Google are facing concerns about exploiting user data. In June 2017, Google decided to discontinue the practice of scanning users’ emails for advertising purposes.
Is anonymous data collecting really detrimental to users? If the market is one-sided and users’ data is unfairly exploited by data collectors, then the answer is decidedly “Yes”. When users can participate in the process and receive incentives for sharing their data, then the process becomes fairer and even beneficial for users.
What if you yourself could control your data and be rewarded accurately for the value it creates?
The era of trading data without user consent is over. The new ecosystem is decentralized, impartial, and mutually beneficial. To change this unfair and inefficient trading model, we need a new platform and unit of data exchange.
The first step towards fulfilling this vision is to introduce Measurable Data Token (MDT), a new token for data exchange.
Measurable Data Token (MDT) connects users, data providers, and data buyers and denominates the value of data. It compensates users for sharing anonymous data points while providing data buyers and providers with a more efficient trading model.
*This is the 1st blog in a series of five on What MDT is and How it works. Stay tuned on the following updates!
Read the MDT WhitePaper: http://measurable.net/docs/whitepaper.pdf
Website http://measurable.net/
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