Data ownership — driver of positive impact
Do you know the value of your Facebook data?
The answer might surprise you: according to LetAlone, Facebook (now rebranded as Meta) earns up to US$900 per year by selling each users’ personal information to other companies. On average, Meta has data on each user to fill 400,000 Word docs. Google is estimated to hold about 3 million Word docs full of data about each user. This includes everything from our clicks and likes to messages to searches to anything beyond our imagination.
Not only are we missing out on the profits generated by our data, we also don’t have a clue how extensively our data is being collected and stored.
Despite being generated by us, our data is something that almost feels removed from our daily lives. In large part, our apathy can be attributed to the word ‘data’ — it sounds technical and holds no direct meaning in our everyday lives. We, in the real world, care about health, people, connection, financial stability, our actions. In a digital world, what we care about and consider valuable is represented in data. This collection of our digital actions, connections, beliefs and preferences form up our digital identity.
So, really, what’s being monetised for us and what we don’t have full sovereignty and control over, is our digital identity.
When put like this, I believe, all those people clicking ‘accept’ on all-encompassing cookie preferences, will start caring a whole lot more about owning and controlling their identities.
I have strong reasons to believe that the era of our data and identity being the product of large centralised corporations is more in sight than most expect. Too many serious data breaches over the last 10 years have led to new enforced data protection laws and the rise of strong movement of communities in web3 who are committed to decentralisation and giving ownership to the individuals. It is especially important not to underestimate the legal frameworks which is an important factor in the equation of change. Though you’d think that on most occasions extensive laws like the GDPR decrease the freedom and creativity of developers and builders, Vitalik Buterin highlights that these laws ‘can have positive consequences by encouraging the development of more decentralized, user-sovereign applications’. And it’s pretty hard to argue with that, we need stronger push towards maximizing user-sovereignty. Only an estimated 65% of the world’s population live within a jurisdiction where modern data privacy and protection laws have been enforced. And even amongst this, the extent of actual application is uneven at best.
How positive impact is connected to data ownership
Why are we so obsessed with data ownership at Dottyland? ‘This problem chose us’ ~ Kevin Owocki in response to why he obsesses over solving the infinite sybil resistance issue. We are on a long-term mission to mobilise consumers in climate-positive behaviour because we believe (and the data supports us) that, without realising it themselves, individuals hold significant power to make industry-level change.
For mass consumer behavioural change, individual positive impact and actions must be properly rewarded and incentivised.
In order to create a serious incentive system, impactful actions must be acknowledged, aggregated and verified. The only way for this to work out for the individual (who is at the center of it all) is that they must own all of that data and have full power and control over sharing or not sharing it.
So from this point onwards we see giving impact data ownership (aka the impact identity that it forms) to the individuals as the critical foundational building block and first problem we need to solve.
Once this is in place, we can focus on creating an ecosystem of rewards and building utilities.
What can the near future look like
Although we are primarily focused on impact-related data, we are true believers that sovereign data ownership is possible for all personal data. I say ‘possible’ because I still believe people should have a choice over whether they want to hold sovereignty over their identity. There will be plenty of service providers who will offer to be our data custodians and manage our data and identity for us. But imagine just some of the most obvious use cases data ownership and the ability to move around with our data across platforms on our terms creates:
- One KYC form (first attempts at this are already out there)
- One login wallet (familiar concept to all web3 participants and those living in digitally progressive countries such as Estonia)
- Configurable and user-friendly settings on data sharing and the expected benefits/earning in exchange
- No building your audience from scratch on new platforms (Lens)
- Easy proof of anything — education, work, impact, credit behaviour (many early examples in this field as well already)
Our data, that makes up our digital sovereign identity, can move with us and work for us. And when I talk about identity, I actually mean all the fractional thematic forms it can take. Having a separate identity for work, friends, impact, gaming fits perfectly within this new world. Parts of it can be public, parts of it private.
It has to serve our real economic needs like under collateralised lending, leasing an apartment and negotiating health insurance, to name a few.
And the really cool and exciting thing about all of this is that it’s not a sci-fi story. Most of this is already gathering up speed, with iterations already being applied to first attempts with much focus on being able to move from technical feasibility towards user onboarding and behavioural adoption. In other words, we will see an explosion of practical applications within these next few years.
Cheers to owning our identities!
