Can we take back control of our personal data?
Can we take back control of our personal data?
Personal data and theft associated with it is all the talk lately. With Facebook's latest debacle and resulting extensive media coverage, even the most technologically uninformed person became anxious about their personal information. The practice is frankly unethical, but when multi million dollar deals are in the works, corporations tend to turn a blind eye.
But what can really be done to stop the abuse from data brokers, advertisement repositories and other companies that crave your personal data so much? If you want to have the benefit of using internet and its websites, you have to sacrifice your privacy to some extent. That has been the rule for many years.
Unfortunately, there isn't really an ideal solution available yet. There is a mutually beneficial compromise though, with the potential to change how your data is collected, processed and what it is used for. This has become possible with the rise of blockchain, as it can provide a platform bereft of deceit, theft or mistrust.
One interesting project is Datareum, a decentralized marketplace that is designed to let people monetize their personal data by providing it to organizations and researchers that need this data for their marketing strategies and social studies. A decentralized online survey marketplace built on blockchain architecture allows to guarantee security and privacy of information, avoid intermediaries and ease the monetization. While it may not be possible to avoid data leak completely, it is possible to take control of it, quantify it and get paid for providing it.
The system works in a following way:
First an organization publishes a survey indicating target demographics such as age, gender, location, salary, and so on. This organization deposits DTN tokens that are held in a smart contract until the providers answer the survey.
The providers who fit the demographics receive a push notification or just find the survey by browsing the iOS or Android app in their free time. Then they may complete the survey, entering it into the data marketplace.
The data is analyzed and, according to the smart contract, is either passed on to the requester or rejected. If the conditions are met, the results are passed on and payment in DTN tokens is transferred to the provider of data. A small commission from it is paid to the Datareum network.
Later this same data, that they had already purchased, may be resold by the requester and in this case the proceeds are split between the original requester and data provider.
In such a system there are many benefits for data providers. They can choose exactly what data to make available for purchase or offer for free, they remain anonymous, they receive payment immediately upon the smart contract completion and, best of all, the same data they provided once, can keep working for them forever, if they chose to make it available for resale.
Organizations that request information, on the other hand, can be sure of its trustworthiness, as the data is provided by a real human, not collected by a bot. They receive relevant, ethically sourced data from specified demographics only and are in full control of their funds without using a centralized agent or intermediary.
All-in-all Datareum it set to become one of the big players on the data broker market, so it is a good idea to keep an eye out for them if that is your area of work or interest.
If you would like more information about Datareum, please visit their website and social media pages, the links can be found below.
Have you been a victim of the many recent data leaks? Do you think a blockchain based solution will be sufficient? Are there any other ways of dealing with it? Please leave a comment with your opinion.
Author's Bitcointalk: OceanWind33
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