The data industry today is fraught with a number of fatal flaws from the perspective of those creating the data – the users. Information collected by enterprise-level corporations like Facebook, Apple, and Google is being used to channel advertising and drive profits.
Google, for example, publicly acknowledges utilizing user data to drive advertising revenue. Apple does slightly less, but blocks others from reaching you, and even makes certain that the data it collects is kept for in-house sales purposes. Facebook may be the worst, with new products coming online so that advertisers can cross platforms with user-specified ad controls based on user likes and dislikes.
The reality is that free services, promised by most of these platforms, are anything but free, as users are subjected to huge volumes of advertising. Plus, all the shared data is stored, analyzed, and managed so that future purchasing trends can be manipulated. As Andrew Lewis famously quipped in 2010, “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.”
What Can Be Done?
Every day, users are creating stunningly large amounts of data, whether from wearables, social media, or communications.
In fact, according to Datum, “Every day we create 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data, and 90% of the world’s data today has been created in the last 2 years alone. Data stored grows 4x faster than the world economy and contributes to a substantial shift in economic power and source of economic value.”
All that data, tracking your likes and dislikes, desires, searches, and life choices, has huge value for advertisers. The difficulty, of course, is how to quantify and monetize the data that consumers produce every day.
As a secure and decentralized marketplace for data, Datum aims to democratize access to this data for users, ensuring that those who produce the data can have their fair share of the value that can be gleaned from it.
The methodology for monetizing the data is built around a Blockchain platform where client data is protected on a decentralized NOSQL database. Users are able to take advantage of the platform by backing up any sort of structured data, whether social media data, wearable device data, or IOT data from smart devices.
That data is stored on nodes by miners across the decentralized ledger. The miners simply provide storage facilities, and are compensated for it. The data is secured by the Blockchain and protected from any service or client having access without specific user permission.
While businesses will certainly continue to need access to data, the platform allows users to choose which businesses will have access, and receive compensation for granting that access. Data can be stored securely and monetized by users rather than be centralized profiteering corporations.
Getting Your Money’s Worth
The difficulty arises in how to monetize user data. However, Datum has engineered an ingenious solution via tokenization. The company will begin its Initial Token Offering in September 12th and run through October 12th, and will offer DATG tokens to buyers. The tokens can be used within the platform. The presale has already begun, with strong results.
Data owners pay a small fee in DATG for storing their data in a private and secure Blockchain platform. This small payment covers the cost of data storage on miner nodes, as miners are compensated in DATG as well. Datum uses a simple and easy to use application for users to allow or disallow access to certain sets of previously stored data.
Companies seeking access to user data must then purchase the data using DATG, and will then have access, based on user permissions, to data that users have agreed to release. Those DATG will then be shared directly to the data owner, thereby monetizing the content and producing a closed system of data use and sales.
As Datum says:
“If every person in the world ends up using Datum, that’s theoretically around 7 billion sources of data points, which businesses can utilize. The good thing is that even users who do not have the resources or bargaining power like Google, FB, etc., can now monetize their own data, wherein businesses can now work on buying such data from users directly.”
Blockchain Data Revolution
Blockchains are about decentralizing control and access. Own your data. Datum’s Blockchain solution is no different, creating a system to decentralize one of the fundamental areas of the internet, data. Datum is ensuring better opportunities for everyone in safeguarding and benefiting from the data they create every day.