Large corporations are currently walking over each others’ faces to gather data on us. Who can blame them – the biggest and most profitable companies in the world specialise in it. They see data as an inevitable asset class, one they can plunder. But that’s all about to change.
Personal Customer Data will very quickly move from being an asset to a liability. We haven’t seen it yet, but coming soon a courtroom nearby will be ‘data litigation’ cases. Think multi-billion dollar court settlements for lax protections and real physical consequences of data misuse. We’ll see corporations hit by both governments and citizens. The technology needed solve the data problem couldn’t come at a better time – yep, here I go again espousing the virtues of blockchain. But this thing is as real as the promise of the internet was. Just like the dot com boom, blockchain will misfire and take a little while to sort out the tech shortcomings, but it will be as big as promised. It is filled with opportunities to literally turn the data business upside down.
The problem of course has always been that while our data isn’t worth much in isolation – a few dollars per user per quarter – it is worth a lot when it gets aggregated by a single firm like Facebook. Many applications in the social media realm like steem.io are creating social platforms where we will own and control our data. Steem might end up as the Friendster or Myspace of blockchain social, but the shift is big, and it goes a little something like this:
In the future, we’ll be able to sell our data to corporations. Those who currently buy advertising, based on our data, will eventually pay us directly instead of some intermediary. Let’s take banking as an example. Currently banks invest millions per month trying to reach people who might require finance for a new home. They use services like Facebook and Google to see who’s posting about open houses, having garage sales or maybe just had babies – social triggers that locate their best potential target audience. But for every hundred or so people the reach, they do business with only one. While the cost of advertising in digital is cheaper and more targeted than TV and outdoor, the cost per acquisition of a new home loan is still very high – few thousand dollars minimum. Imagine instead us allowing banks ‘rent a data key’ off us directly for a few hundred dollars. With all our relevant financial, employment, living expenses and other anonymised data. Banks who want our business pay us directly for the privilege of access to customers with real intent instead employing a digital dragnet. Competing banks then put an algorithm to task to come back with their best offer for a loan. We get paid via our data to choose a bank to do business with. It will be cheaper for the banks. It will be profitable and painless for us. All the while the data more accurate as it is promulgated via a blockchain. Banks would only need to pay for data sold by customers who actually take out a loan, via a time-sensitive smart contract. This way the process maintains integrity. And boom, just like that, a great data reversal has occurred.
It’s possibilities like this that get me excited about the emerging blockchain era – it seems it is possible to get the internet we always dreamed of. Now it’s time for us to get building the world we want to live in.