In 1965, the first attempt at bike-sharing took place in Amsterdam, organized by a group of activists, with the service failing due to theft and vandalism. The second attempt occurred 30 years later in Copenhagen, failing for the same reasons. By 2010, however, bike sharing services launched all over the world, with an estimated 1 million bikes available globally by 2015 (with China being the leader in terms of number of bikes.)
In Germany
Bike-sharing companies have been multiplying here in Germany, too, starting with Deutsche Bahn and their Call-a-Bike service in 2012. Even if you don’t use the bike sharing providers yourself, you will probably have noticed the bikes spread all over the city-partially piling up in certain areas. Considering the state in which some of these bicycles are left on the side of the street, as well as prices ranging between 50 Cents-1.50 Euro per half hour, you may wonder how these companies actually turn around a profit. The most probable answer is: user-data.
Valuable User-Data
In order to start using any of the bike sharing services, you need to download an app, register with the necessary information, choose a payment option and then you can start biking. All of these steps include valuable user-data. While you are most likely used to giving some basic information about yourself when signing up for any kind of service, the real value lies in data that is being collected, that you may not even be aware of. You have to agree to the use of an integrated GPS system, which monitors where you go with the shared bikes. This information can easily be used, sold or profited from, because once it’s known where you usually drive the bikes, it then becomes easy to target you with advertisements for shops/services that are on your way.
Gregor Kolbe from the Consumer Advice Center says that it is not apparent to most customers that such data collection is even happening and that companies need to be a lot more transparent in that regard, so that customers can consider that information when making a decision on which provider to use.
Data Privacy?
Not only is the data often collected without transparency, but as we have seen in the recent past with Facebook and Uber, data leaks unfortunately do occur, whether that be due to a security breach or information illegally shared with or sold to third parties. One of the Asian bike sharing providers here in Germany, Obike, had a data leak occur just last year, affecting users all over the world. The user-data of Obike’s users were openly accessible online, including GPS information of bike rides, email addresses, photos and telephone numbers. This data was neither encrypted nor protected, and available online for at least two weeks.
Well, isn’t that something to wrap your head around: there are many companies that exist, which offer a product or service, with which the company actually makes next to nothing in profit. These companies (such as these bike sharing companies) exist for the purpose of offering you a service or product with which they can gain access to and control over some of your user-data.
repay.me: Transparent Cashback For Your Data
This lack of transparency as well as repay.me’s fair-share concept is what differentiates repay.me from any other company worldwide, that is collecting your data. repay.me is a marketplace on which you will be able to buy/sell new and used products, with the possibility of 100% cashback on all purchases. While this may sound too good to be true, the core concept is quite simple. Just as other companies collect your data, so does repay.me. The difference is, repay.me distributes 80% of their advertising revenue every day, back to the users, in the form of cashback. This means you do not only get paid for your data, but repay.me gives you the option of choosing how active you want to be on their marketplace (the more active a user is=the more data is generated=the more cashback the user receives). In this way, repay.me is giving users more control over their data and allowing the users themselves to profit from it as well.
