Data as a Commons

Our counter-intuitive revenue model

The explanation of our revenue model assumes an understanding of how Facebook and Google generate revenue, as well as how the largest technology companies use data to influence user and/or consumer behaviour.

Background

If required, the following articles provide useful background:

• The Rise (& Coming Fall) of Facebook and Google’s Advertising Platforms by John Battelle, founder of NewCo, Federated Media, sovrn Holdings, Web 2 Summit, Wired, Industry Standard.
• Tragedy of the Data Commons by Jane Yakowitz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Brooklyn Law School
• Introducing Personal Data Exchanges & the Personal Data Economy by Michael Haupt.

Key Facts

• Online advertising is big business: $532 billion in 2016, $590 billion expected for 2017, with strongest growth in the Middle East and Africa, followed by APAC i.e. developing nations.
• Marketing technology has purportedly permitted better targeting of online ads, however adblock usage grew 30% globally in 2016 to 615 million adblock downloads. This is a symptom of an advertising ecosystem which isn’t working well for end users.
• One of the most valuable resources within the Internet economy — personal data — is produced by its users, who have little to no say in how it is used.
• Data in and of itself has little value, but when applied or analysed in the right way it can help to find patterns, predict future behaviours, personalise service offerings, and even to shape people’s behaviour and preferences.
• China is expected to account for more than $14 billion in the big-data distribution and exchange market by 2020, calling data “the new factor of production and a strategic resource of the country.” China is the first country to embrace the potential value of User Generated Content which, when added to data produced by IoT (Internet of Things), will help surface useful patterns and predictions far superior to today’s marketing technology.
• The concept of privacy and data anonymisation is increasingly obsolete in a world characterised by rapid growth in networks and ubiquitous information sharing.
• Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple are the five largest companies in the world. They have achieved their dominance at least in part through the extensive capture and use of personal data.
• Increasingly, users and policy makers are recognising the practical impact of surreptitious data collection and analysis. The Trump presidential campaign took advantage of advanced psychometric profiling and advertising through social media, profoundly influencing the final outcome of the election. In other words, the combination of data and advertising can be used to influence behaviour.
• Breaches of data security are increasing, with serious consequences. The US Internal Revenue Service gradually recognized, over the course of a year, that almost 3/4 million Social Security Numbers had been stolen from its systems. Far more seriously, in September 2017, Equifax acknowledged that nearly half of all US citizens had suffered theft of their personal data, including “names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers.”

Key Predictions

• Policy makers will increasingly place pressure on how personal data is used by companies. From May 2018, the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) can impose fines of up to €20 million or 4 per cent of global turnover (whichever is higher) for companies which misuse personal data. The EU has already fined Google a record $2.7 billion in it’s first antitrust case. Facebook will likely be punished relatively soon for destabilising democratic systems.The potential cost of getting it wrong will start to outweigh the monetisation value of the data itself.
• The number of annual data breaches will continue its upward trend, resulting in a shift in the way individuals secure their data towards favouring Personal Data Exchanges or Personal Information Management Systems.

Our Vision

We envision an open, civilised, data-driven society in which all data contributes to a valuable Data Commons, and in which prosocial behaviour is incentivised by gamifying the distribution of money via a unique monetary tool.

An important part of our proposed new social contract is a mechanism to incentivise behaviour that the society to which an individual chooses to belong has agreed is beneficial. We call this prosocial behaviour and you can read the details of our proposed Universal Abundance Income.

Phase 1: Crowdfunding Revenue

We require significant fiat money to fund the activities required to gain large traction. Our core offering, the free Human Unique Identifier (HUID), will be unveiled on 02/02/2020, at the conclusion of the Reboot Humanity Symposium. Launch of the HUID will be preceded by a year-long marketing and educational campaign designed to inform those who are interested about the need for a different social contract — in a fun and engaging way.

We have set the ambitious target of reaching 1 billion people, because once 10% of a population is committed to an idea, is it extremely likely that it will eventually become the prevailing opinion of the entire group — in this case the planet’s population of 8.5 billion by 2030.

Revenue at launch will be generated by following a crowdfunding model, in which each person may register for a free (for life) HUID. However, we will request additional voluntary contributions from those who are inspired by the vision. These voluntary contributions will secure additional lifetime benefits, as permitted by applicable regulations. See our underlying assumptions for these figures:

Anticipated annual crowdfunded revenue for Project 2030

We believe that our vision of a new social contract, coupled with the idea of ‘free money’ will be inspiring enough to millions who will help the campaign to ‘go viral.’ We also recognise that to achieve wide adoption requires a tool with these features:

• Clear personal benefit, especially to early adopters,
• Easy to adopt and use,
• Benefits to the person promoting this from recipient adopting this,
• Open architecture, not controlled by a government or company,
• Technologically unhackable, even with quantum computing, and
• Accepted by the institutions that people rely upon to conduct their daily lives.

Note: these voluntary contributions may expire once the Universal Abundance Income becomes operational. Payments are expected to continue for a minimum of 2 years.

Historically, some of the most valuable software offerings have been those that created a “gateway” or “platform” upon which many other activities depend. These include not only for-profit enterprises such as Google and Facebook, but also those such as Wikipedia and Mozilla which are not (at least, not directly) monetized.

What would be the worth of a completely intuitive, non-hackable, proof of identity? It could, conceivably, become the de facto standard for every electronic activity on Earth. Tied to a cryptocurrency with provable “chain of custody” for all transactions, it could solve all of these challenges:

• Identity theft
• Use of anonymity to troll and otherwise manipulate public discourse
• Hacked elections, and voter suppression/false voter registration
• Disintermediation of transactions, including certifications and more

That, no doubt, only highlights a few of the ultimate uses.

While others are endeavoring to enter this space, we will have at least two major advantages: the largest bully pulpit for a software announcement in history, and a close relationship with the leading company in the quantum computing space, which is also rolling out proprietary software necessary for protecting cryptography from quantum hacking.

By giving away the core HUID on the proven “freemium” model, we would assure ease of adoption. The missing element — still to be figured out — is how to include a benefit from “viral activity”. We need to give early adopters a tangible benefit, not only from their own use, but also from enrolling others in their networks to sign up and use the HUID.

There will be numerous spin-off and upgrade advantages, some quite profitable, from establishing the world’s standard HUID.

Phase 2: ‘Advertising’ Revenue

Operations of the HUID, as well as payment of the UAI, will require significant outside revenue. We anticipate generating this revenue from advertising, but not advertising in the conventional sense.

The advertising we support will be informational more than persuasive in nature, and designed to captivate attention based on honest identification of, and attention to, user needs. Users will have a button to designate ads as “hype” or “factual”. Ads receiving too many hype hits will be discontinued.

We will call this type of “advertising” notifications. In the short term, these will resemble conventional ads, with two exceptions. First, they will only be displayed to users who select the “free” HUID, and even then in as respectful a manner as possible. Notifications will not start playing a video without asking permission. Notifications will not crowd out material being read. Dishonest notifications — such as the endless schemes to make a lot of money without special skills by paying for a course — will be quickly flagged as “hype”.

Second, because we will decisively know the age and other key demographics of each user, we will be able to make certain that notifications are appropriate. Children will never be offered X-rated videos or products, for example.

In the long-term, the possibilities are staggering. Recalling that we will, over time, establish the most complete profile of each individual of any platform in history, this brings to mind a metaphor. We won’t just know the “shoe size” of a user. We’ll know the entire footprint, including how weight is distributed while walking, size of each toe, health of the foot, and everything else the user permits us to measure and record on their behalf.

The more data the user allows us to capture about their activities and physiology, the more helpful the HUID system will be to them. The key to this partnership is that they must believe that we are operating with highest integrity, as demonstrated by consistent deeds that are congruent with our words, and that each affiliated app or other offering we unveil is verified as to its efficacy and integrity before receiving our “HUID Seal of Approval”.

Although we envision HUID operating as a for-profit affiliate of Project 2030, it will be governed by more stringent internal rules than a conventional startup:

It will be a “B” Corporation, or Benefit Corporation, with 20% of profits and non-dilutable ownership earmarked for two initiatives, the Project 2030 Ten Year Plan, and the Celebration Society Development Fund.

It will have not only the conventional Board of Advisors and Board of Technical Advisors, but also a Board of Ethics, initially appointed by us from persons of unimpeachable character. Later, there will be regular public elections, with each user having a vote and any legal adult user eligible to run for a seat in an online “electoral process”, that may serve as a model for other governments. (We favor a model such as 5 votes per person for 1st choice, 3 votes for second choice, and 1 vote for third choice, to avert need for runoffs.) The Board of Ethics will have an oversight role, primarily Advisory, but with the power — by majority vote — to veto decisions that might compromise our Mission and Corporate Charter.

This revenue will be generated by offering an advertising platform to external advertisers. The model is most easily understood by comparison to existing online advertising models employed by Google and Facebook. However, there are key differences:

• Data Ownership: Personal data is fully owned and managed by the individual user in a secure, private data vault, using blockchain technology. The key to accessing the data is the Human Unique Identifier, which is at the core of everything we do.
• Ad Targeting: Disruptive, intrusive, manipulative ads are replaced with useful notifications where preexisting customer intent is matched with relevant market supply. Currently available ad choice data will be enhanced with quantified self data, environmental and location data and surrounding object (IoT) data. Always, with a self-learning feature so the notifications process gets smarter over time based on user signaling.
• Payment: Advertisers are required to purchase tokens, rather than making direct payment in an established currency. Pay-per-Click is replaced with Pay-per-Delivery, in which the advertiser pays for successful delivery of a notification. By way of example, 70% of the payment goes to the recipient of the notification and 30% goes to the platform. (Percentages can vary over time to ensure an equitable income stream).
• Unusual protections: To deter unscrupulous user behaviour, the recipient has 12 hours to engage with the notification, after which 75% is returned to the advertiser i.e. the user pays a 5% penalty for not engaging (no purchase is required, however). The user is able to fine tune the type and frequency of notifications, as well as blocking particular advertisers.

Phase 3: API Revenue

We anticipate that the HUID will become a central part of each individual’s life, monitoring things like income and expenses, travel, health, education, relationships and much more. We will allow developers of additional plugins and products to access each user’s personal data (with explicit, revocable permission, and strict siloing to prevent development of separate databases of users’ data) via API’s. A micro-charge will be levied for API calls. If we get this right, the HUID will create an entirely new market, much the same as the Internet created entirely new markets.

Ultimately, by way of example, we will have hospitals and Urgent Care/ER facilities Notifying users that their physiology is showing dangerous parameters, relative to their own body’s historic readings, and encouraging specific preventative action. When our system is proven to be the best way to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and diabetic shock, by virtue of testimonials and even journal published studies — perhaps as soon as 2030 — we will be established as a de facto global standard.

Existing Similar Attempts

We are tracking over 30 similar developments at Self Sovereign Identities, however all of these initiatives lack at least one of these important traits:

1. They are not truly open source and citizen owned i.e. they are backed by a company which users already don’t trust with their data, or backed by a government;
2. They are not transparent in their governance;
3. They lack an Ethics Board with teeth;
4. They do not include the large-scale education campaign, which will inevitably result in low adoption and therefore too little network effect for the concept to grab the public’s attention;
5. They do not include a Universal Abundance Income for participating (to the user, the single most compelling reason to sign up).

Next

See the assumptions behind these numbers, find out how you can help or check out the Frequently Asked Questions.