philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Startups Want Consumers to Be Paid for Their Personal Data

... Now real estate billionaire Frank McCourt has committed $250 million to fund Project Liberty, which he hopes will restyle the web as a platform owned by the public. Of that amount, McCourt — former owner of the L.A. Dodgers — earmarked $25 million to create a decentralized social networking protocol that aims to reinvent the model for consumer data governance online. ...

However, WSJ suggests the path to such a result is “unclear.” This is due less to technological impediments than consumers’ own social behaviors. “Social-media companies optimize their networks to keep users there. Would a decentralized social network be as sticky? Plus, blockchain technology tends to make the web run more slowly and expensively,” WSJ reports. Woodham told WSJ that the pitch isn’t as much about earning potential as avoiding exploitation. ...

Tapestri in November debuted an app that pays consumers up to $15 per month cash in exchange for their anonymized location history, which is then resold to brands. Black consumers who download their datadata from Amazon, Google Maps, Netflix, Uber and YouTube can then be paid for it by Streamlytics, whose Clture app makes it available to brands after anonymizing.

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/startups-want-consumers-to-be-paid-for-their-personal-data/

And the original source is here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/personal-data-is-worth-billions-these-startups-want-you-to-get-a-cut-11638633640