This company wants to end modern-day data slavery
We are more and more present on the Internet, leaving more and more data and network giants like Google or Facebook, but also intelligence agencies are very interested in this data. With social networks, big data, refrigerators or washing machines that are connected to the Internet, companies and researchers promise us a world, customized to our desires and activities. But it’s also about privacy and surveillance.
Data slavery
The big Internet companies collect huge amounts of data about us, analyze and market them. American artist Jennifer Lyn Morone resists being used as a marketing object. She collects the data about herself and markets it. For this purpose, she has founded her own company: the “Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc.” To get free online services, she points out, people hand over intimate information to technology firms.
“Personal data is much more valuable than you think,” she says.
Since it emerged in March 2018 that a company called Cambridge Analytica had acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways to use it for political propaganda, voices calling for a rethink of the handling of online personal data have grown louder. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for a price to be put on personal data, asking researchers to come up with solutions.
Jennifer Lyn Morone's idea coming to life
The tech startup BehviourExchange believes they have the answer. To shift the balance between online users (=data owners) and tech companies, they designed an elaborate digital platform that basically lets people turn their data into money on the one hand, and B2C businesses reach their target customers on the other.
The platform can customize websites content according to individual users’ profiles while users keep ownership of their data which is securely stored on a blockchain. Users can at any point decide whether or not to share their profile with the platform. For sharing their data, users get paid with special utility tokens (BEX) which they can use for online shopping and services.
The creators believe they have come up with a way to achieve a new, fair paradigm for digital marketing communication and improve the security of personal information. The BehaviourExchange is set to enter the market by the end of 2018 and they will start a public token sale (ICO) in September.
