Harvest Your Personal Digital Data and Cash in on Yourself

At Steemfest a presenter mentioned our personal digital data and making use of it.

What do you do with your data?

Facebook and Google sure as hell make profitable use of it. But, why can't we access our own data? We can't even use it ourselves to see how it's being used or what others are learning about us. We don't have much control of what they can use.

We just provide the data, and then they monetize it through advertising, trying to capture and cash in on our attention. All of our internet actions are potential data points to cash in on, which the corporations are harvesting for their own gains. The privacy of this information can work towards our gain, rather than the gain of others while we get nothing for our data.

I go browsing on sites, and I get targeted with ads from previous sites I've visited. I don't click on them. I ignore what isn't relevant, but it's still annoying. Many people now use add-blockers, so the tap is drying up with less and less ad clickers.

Why not take charge of our data, and even earn from it?

Alternatives to this paradigm are being created, like CitizenMe. They are want to put "Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Assistants, Virtual Reality (VR) and the Internet of Things (IoT)" into our hands as digital citizens, with the aim "to liberate your personal data and make AI accessible to everyone."

With this developed, we can see what data we are sharing at all our interactions. This will allow us to collect all the data and construct a "digital mirror" to tell us things about ourselves we may not know. We can choose which data we want to sell to companies.

For example, our location at a time might be useful, for directed marketing or some other information gathering purpose. Say if each day at a certain time, there are 50% less shoppers in one area of the city compared to another, who knows.

Other start ups include Meeco as a way to get you to own and beenfit from your data as a currency, and Digi.me to collect your social network data and search through it. Companies are also into the development of medical data being incorporated into personally accessible data, like Google and DeepMind getting access recently. As it stands, I've never seen my medical chart...

As the digital revolution progresses further in development, privacy and or data will become something we are more aware of and take more seriously, especially considering the monetary aspect to it. The European Union already has a "General Data Protection Regulation" that starts in May 2018, and focuses on an individuals' control of personal data. Maybe more of this is to come.

Instead of the current "digital oligarchs" selling or holding our data until it becomes valuable for them to use, while we don't know what it is, the accountability will be raised. They won't be able to just do anything with our data, as it will be our property to sell instead, and then we get to make money as well.

This is the map of connectivity we have created with the internet:

As more things become connected around us with IPv6 and the Internet of Things (IoT), that map is going to exponentially grow, and so too will the data related to our lives. Changing how we own our data is something to get done sooner rather than later. We are moving towards more control of our data, and the ability to make it work for us.

What do you think?

[Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

[References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

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