Blockchain At Heart of Personal Data Monetization Service
Tired of giving your valuable personal data to Google or Facebook? Plenty of people are, and now a company called Algebraix Data is building a Blockchain-based network that will allow people to sell their personal data to advertisers in exchange for crypto currency.
The story of the rise of big data is, in large part, the story of how the big Web firms in Silicon Valley built new technologies to collect, store, and analyze huge amounts of data, and in turn created new business models to exploit those insights. Services from Google and Facebook (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo etc.) may ostensibly be “free” to users. But the companies extract their fees in other ways – by gathering data about you and essentially selling it to advertisers for the purpose of serving highly targeted ads.
Plenty of people don’t like this business model. But there are plenty more who aren’t aware that it exists. And because the services provided by Web giants are compelling –even addicting, some say – there hasn’t been much resistance. Next May’s introduction of the GDPR will force the Web giants to be more transparent and upfront about how they use people’s data – but only for citizens of the European Union.
Now a company in Austin, Texas, is looking to use emerging technologies like the Blockchain to turn these data-driven business models on their sides. Algebraix Data CEO Charlie Silver, a veteran of the first dot-com boom, recently explained to Datanami how his new system will work:
“We’re allowing users to own their data by creating a personal secure vault where individuals can store their data, and if they choose to share it, they get compensated with tokens to view ads,” Silver says. “So instead of advertising on Facebook to target specific types of users, advertisers can target those users precisely the same way, if not better, by offering them compensation directly.”
It’s a new business model for Algebraix, which spent several years developing something that it calls “the algebra of data.” This technology, which was spearheaded by Indiana math professor Gary Sherman, was originally created to speed up big data processing on cloud platforms or parallel clusters running Hadoop and Spark.
Now Silver and company are looking to apply their mathematical techniques to workloads running on the Blockchain, the peer-to-peer transactional ledger that provides the technological foundation for cryptocurrencies.
It’s all about scaling, Silver says. “We’re applying data algebra to the Blockchain because we will have hundreds of millions of users, hopefully billions of users, on our platform, monetizing their personal data,” he says. “In order for that network to work, scalability and performance are going to be huge issues, and that’s where our technology plays a role.
