Changing the data market business model from buying and selling of your data to buying and selling the “use” of your data.

Current advertising data market industry involves selling and buying of data. Regardless of the type of data the advertisers are looking for, it’s all about collecting the data from various means, categorizing it, perhaps pseudo anonymizing it and selling the data to advertisers. And data, as it turns out, is a very lucrative business. The global market size of the advertising market is estimated to be US$600–800 billion and the internet makes up about half of that size.

You probably have heard this statement before. If it is free, you are probably the product being sold. And this is a very common way for the data market players to create a “free” application that allows the collection of data that the market players will buy and sell. The more accurate the data, the more valuable. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc all use similar business models. But there are other players in this market, some you may have heard of in the news (Cambridge Analytics for example) or smaller companies that trade your data under the covers. They will collect from various sources, reshuffle, and resell the data to others.

But as with any business model, there are challenges and the data market is not without its share of issues.

• Stale data — In most cases, data is being collected and sold. This means it is a data collected at a point in time. This leads to stale data, only useful if it is used relatively quickly.
• Lack of transparency — Users have very little transparency into how their data is used, where it is going and who ultimately ends up using them.
• Valuation of your data — Users are unaware how much their data is actually worth.
• Privacy laws — The vast amount of different data protection laws creates the data market players to both constantly shift their business model and ensure flexibility in their operational process to keep up with the varying different data protection laws around the world.
• Ethical concerns — There are ethical concerns when companies knowingly or unknowingly expose your personal data. Because in most cases, the user is not aware of how much data they are agreeing to be collected nor how it may be used, they hand over the control of their data to a private entity.

How can Partisia Blockchain help?

Partisia Blockchain’s privacy first blockchain with research lead secure multiparty computation (sMPC) can help solve these issues and also provide data market participants with alternate business models that can bridge the gap between consumer privacy concerns and better data overall.

• Users owning their data — The blockchain allows for a decentralized network where control of your data remains with the user. In a similar vain of “not your keys, not your token”, blockchain plus MPC allows individuals to retain control over their own data and selectively allow the use of the data.
• Enable privacy of the user data — With Partisia Blockchains sMPC, data analytics companies can request computation to extract data they need without them needing to see the actual data. This allows for privacy to be maintained while allowing for computation of the data.
• Rewarding users — Create an incentive model to reward the users for providing the use of their data
• Real time data — Because the users data remain with the users themselves, the data becomes accessible in real time. When someone requires access to the user data, they can request the analysis and extract details from data that is up to date.
• Transparency of the data — Blockchain is about transparency and through it users can understand exactly what data they have allowed access to, when the data is being accessed and be rewarded for the use of it.
• Data privacy law compliance — Through sMPC and PBC’s jurisdiction management tool, compliance to data privacy and protection laws like GDPR can be implemented simply.

This changes the data market business model from buying and selling of your data to buying and selling the use of your data. By shifting the paradigm to a services model, new potential revenue streams become available while being able to solve some of the difficult challenges facing the advertising industry.

Projects like Blockchain-Ads and Kin are already looking to take advantage of this new model and we are exited to see where this will lead in the future.

Connect with us at build@partisiablockchain.com to see how we can help you create new business models, solve challenges and provide new incentives for the users to use your system.