Using blockchains for earning money on your personal data

What is personal data, and why is it supposed to be valuable?

Personal data is a sort of information about someone that may be used for identifying him/her. There are many different sorts of personal data. Some of them may be valuable and profitable for the masses, and some of them can be used only by several people.

For instance, your name is Alice, and it’s considered to be personal data of yours. For your friends and relatives, it will be very easy to identify you by your name, but for someone, who doesn’t know you well, this sort of personal data won’t help for identifying you.

So, there are types of personal data that don’t have a value to be sold, but also, there are some kinds of data that are required, for instance, for those companies that are concentrated on advertising.

Let’s explore some examples:

Your age: A company decides to make an advertising campaign. Their marketing team does an analytics job and understands that their target audience is an 18-25 gap. Here’s where they’ll need to know your age to understand are you going to be engaged in their campaign or not.

Your gender: We all know that washing powder advertising is made for women. So, they’ll need this information about you, as soon as they want to start a successful advertising campaign.

How Social Media use your data?

Have you ever read what is happening to your data when you are registering for Facebook. I am sure most of us don’t.

Did you know that all your history of messages and contacts (if they are connected to your account) are being kept on Facebook servers?

Did you know that, if you are logged in to your account, and you are surfing on the Internet by opening other tabs, this information is also collected by Facebook?

Did you know that the last elections of the US president used data of 50 million users to make a successful campaign for an upcoming president? As it was mentioned above, all cases of using and collecting personal data are done for advertising and promotion purposes. And these are also cases where your data was extremely valuable, but you didn’t get any profit from it.

So, is it possible to get money for providing personal data?

Yes, because the decentralized system of blockchain gives you this opportunity.

Here’s how it works: Let’s imagine that your social network is connected to a data exchange, which is based on blockchain.

When a company wants to search profiles that are matching some criteria, it pays charges via smart contract to have this information.

Price tag

Some networks allow deciding the price of your data on your own. It means that you decide how much money will someone pay to learn your information.

Note: that your information has value as long as it is not easily achievable through your website or other channels.

Your price may be set in tokens, which you can use in other purposes on the same platform or just simply exchange to a fiat currency.

In some platforms, you exchange your personal information. It’s similar to barter relations, the company gives you a discount, or cashback, or something, and you give them your data.

Who is a buyer of your data?

Of course, as it was previously said, your info buyer is a company that needs some details for making successful ads or marketing campaigns. Also, there may be some individuals who will need your information for making researches and so on.