Customer data is the fuel of the money-making machines like Google and Facebook. Companies invest huge money into technology to collect, connect and understand the data to enable better targeting for the advertising business to sell back to customers.

Customer data and behavioral patterns are collected typically under the hood through user interaction with different services on the internet. Does blockchain technology have potential to take companies like Facebook and Google out of the picture or at least weaken their position?

What if customers would be able to trade their personal data same way as coins and tokens are traded today?

Customers could create profiles describing attributes interesting, e.g. an advertisement or any other research companies. Trusted authorities would verify these profiles (e.g., income, location) or potentially through some decentralized consensus algorithm by the network e.g. through p2p. Part of the profile would be a preference to whom and for how much profile owner is willing to expose the information and potentially which way including some ZKP protocols. Temporal identifier of such profile would be available through browser plugin while a customer is browsing the internet.

Site owners could decide if and how much are willing to pay to get access to personal information and preferences of a person using their site, pay for that on the fly through a micro-transaction and in turn resell this information on advertising exchanges and display advertisement. Such information could be traded same way as today billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies flowing 24 hours a day through exchanges around the world.

Customers providing information would be gaining profit directly instead of indirectly through the free services today. Information buyers would gain trusted and more fine-grained information that would allow them to do their business better.

The blockchain could enable a new incarnation of sharing economy model where instead of cars in Uber or apartments in Airbnb personal information would be the subject of trade.

This idea might sound a bit controversial, but the model could bring control over personal information back to people and let them decide if it is for sale and at what price.

— Lukas