Imagine a world where personal data isn’t just something that consumers give away – a world where terms of service agreements read more like shareholder agreements or term sheets, a world where your data makes you money.
Earlier this week during a lecture on Bitcoin Engineering at Stanford University, 21.co CEO, Balaji S. Srinivasan, presented this exact world, one in which data is owned and monetized by the individual. He laid out an in-depth use case whereby Instagram could become the world’s largest stock photography site – with each user making money. Personal Data as an Asset Class
In 2011, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with management consulting firm Bain & Company, published a report targeted at executives in the telecommunications industry titled, “Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class.” In the report, they described “personal data as the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”
To substantiate their claim the authors present an estimate which states, “by 2020 the global volume of digital data will increase more than 40-fold.” They go on to say that, “beyond the sheer volume, data is becoming a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.”
The implications of data as an asset are profound. When data is currency, cash is expendable. Success is measured by growth, not profits:
If data is the new currency, it leads one to conclude that the companies who store our personal data are themselves actually banks.
Breaking the Bank
Web searches, page visits, online purchases, tweets, SMS messages, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, GPS coordinates – this is the data that makes up our digital lives.For the past decade consumers have sacrificed their privacy, building giant banks of data for companies without any upside exposure to the value […]
