Your Data Is Waiting for You! What’s the Best Way to Access It?
A lot of changes having been taking place recently in the world of online data. Firstly, we’ve had a string of high profile data breaches involving the tech giants who harvest our personal information, probably the most famous being the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Then, on May 25, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into force.
The aim of the legislation is to protect data subjects’ rights. The law states that the user is the lawful owner of their personal information, and any online company harvesting this data must gain the owner’s consent for its use.
Article 20 of the GDPR, asserts the right to data portability. Here the law states that the user has the right to request a copy of all the data that companies such as Google and Amazon have collected on them, in a portable, electronic format. This goes a long way to redressing the balance of power in the advertising economy by enabling users to reassert control over their personal information.
A number of services have sprung up to harness the power of the GDPR, and the right to data portability in particular. They enable users to extract their data from the companies that collect, store, use and sell it. These services walk users through the data extraction processes for each separate online entity that the user frequents, supplying templates for the correct forms and assisting users to view what data is being used and how it is shared.
Valuable as many of these services are, the extraction process can take a number of weeks and can be incredibly complex. However, a new initiative, the Liberdy Data Foundation is about to launch the tools to do this far more conveniently, enabling users to easily and automatically access their data.
The Data Foundation is a new non-profit that creates a fair advertising market that protects user privacy and creates a level playing field, where users are financially compensated for the use of their data.
For the Liberdy user, the process of data extraction is fast, smooth and seamless. The user simply has to download the Liberdy app and choose from which service providers they wish to extract their data, such as Google, Instagram, Amazon, Facebook etc. By means of Liberdy’s open source software, the user’s data is imported from all sources and de-personalized so that the user can maintain their anonymity. From then on, the user gets paid, whenever they were targeted by an advertiser, or make a purchase online, as a result of sharing their data.
So, unlike the other data extraction services on the market, Liberdy allows users to not only gain access to their personal information, taking control over deciding what specific data can be used, by whom, but also pays them for its use. They can anonymously share data points such as, age, location, gender and likes across all digital platforms, which the foundation uses to build a super-profile that can be shared to enable pin-point targeting.
An additional advantage of the Liberdy Data Foundation is that the user’s privacy is protected. As a blockchain-based operation, the Foundation is completely transparent, secure and decentralized, which makes it virtually impenetrable as the data is not housed in a single storage system, which could be hacked.
Although a less tangible benefit, users are also becoming part of an Adtech revolution that seeks to permanently overhaul a broken system that puts far too much power in the hands of tech giants. The Foundation enables them to become part of the solution, as it creates a completely new advertising ecosystem that disrupts the status quo to build a more democratic, equitable data economy.
Marketers gain access to consent-based, accurate, targeted data from multiple sources provided by the user. Equally, publishers can incentivize users to provide their permission, by offering enhanced privacy features, such as Liberdy’s anonymous single sign on. They also benefit from more extensive, reliable data and a new pool of users. The greatest winner however is the user. They can extract their data, quickly, smoothly and efficiently and then profit from its use while enjoying an exceptional level of privacy and security. Moreover, in becoming part of the new Adtech economy they can also pay for all kinds of premium services and subscriptions with their data.
So, when deciding to track down their personal information, users need to ask themselves, why they should settle for just accessing their data, when it can be used for so much more.
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