Let’s say you’re a farmer. You grow all kinds of crops, from wheat and corn to beets and apples. You regularly harvest your crops and ship them off to buyers. Generally speaking, you aren’t even selling directly to consumers — you’re selling to middlemen, like processors or maybe directly to local grocery stores who then sell your crops marked up for a profit. There’s a clear chain of production and distribution that earns everyone a profitable living.
Now imagine you’re growing those crops, but no one is buying them. Instead, distributors are taking your crops in exchange for slightly improved methods of delivery. Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense. But that’s exactly what’s happening in the personal data industry.
You produce personal data and everyone seems to be profiting from it except for you. By offering incremental increases inconvenience, companies regularly convince us to give up our data without compensation. They either use the data to greatly improve their own products and therefore their own profit margins, or they sell your data to third parties (usually without your knowledge), or they do both.
Obviously, this situation is hardly beneficial to consumers. But it isn’t ideal for data collectors either. True, they are seeing all the profits at the moment, but as competition for data increases, many find themselves desperately fishing for more data where there isn’t any because the proper incentives aren’t being offered to anyone to provide it. This increases the risk of false data infiltrating the market while no one has any way of telling what’s real and what’s not. The also creates a situation in which more and more companies are pushed closer to the edge of legality and fair practices over privacy in their hunt for data.
That’s why Senno is creating a new paradigm for monetizing personal data. Senno’s blockchain-based platform aims to be the perfect remodel of the personal data industry, benefiting both consumers and data collectors alike:
For consumers
- Consumers finally get full control over their data. Data sharing requests, transactions and information is kept on the blockchain in a clear and transparent way. Users get to choose exactly what information to share and with whom. Sharing can be turned off with the click of a button.
- Consumers are financially incentivized to share their personal data. Incentives can be different for each new data source connected to the system and can be implemented in the form of a single payment or an ongoing revenue share.
For data collectors
- Advertisers and other collectors benefit from a higher level of authenticity since consumers are sharing their data knowingly and directly. The risks of privacy violations are also eliminated.
- Data collectors will finally enjoy the supply needed to meet demand since financial incentives will give consumers a good reason to share their information. Consumer rewards will be paid automatically each time their data is being used by advertisers and data collectors.
The personal data industry doesn’t have to be a source of economic and power imbalance. In fact, done right, the rise of personal data has created a unique opportunity for everyone. Companies can use this technological tool to accomplish some truly remarkable things to make business better, offering better and more effective services. Consumers, on the other hand, have been turned into their own private entrepreneurs producing a valuable resource. All that’s needed is to treat them as such and compensate them for what they produce. Let’s bring some balance to the private data industry.
