Companies can finally stop collecting data and start using it — in an ethical way

Companies can finally stop collecting data and start using it — in an ethical way
Usually when we start talking about problems connected to the use of personal data, the focus is mostly on the individuals and their rights to privacy and control of their data. However, there is also the company’s side of the story, a side that has to deal with availability, access and quality management of customer data.

A high-level overview how a personal datafund works as a point of partnership between companies and individuals.
We want to bring these two worlds together. Our goal is to give a reliable and easy-to-use solution to companies that want to treat personal data in an ethical way. Through our extensive meetings with companies over the past months we’ve identified four sets of problems that businesses have with personal data:

There isn’t always really a good return on customer data.
Data quality is often underwhelming and significant effort is required to make use of it.
There’s a jumble of global regulation and mounting pressure from regulators and customers for personal data protection.
No simple and comprehensive solutions exist that connect user data from different platforms into one cohesive picture.
High price, low quality
The average company’s story could be summed up with something like this. Collecting data is expensive! Businesses are spending billions of dollars each year on a global level to collect, authenticate and protect customer data. At the same time, they are figuratively drowning in that data, while not really knowing how to put it together because this is quite a demanding task.

To add to this pain, the collected data is frequently, frankly, garbage because individuals often give the wrong information to protect their privacy. The gathering processes are mostly inefficient and repetitive as well, and if you reach out to a data broker as a company, in many cases they’ll sell you data that is collected in an unethical way.

More and more expectations
One of the largest pain points in all this mess, and one that the GDPR just made a lot bigger, is of course regulation. By default, data markets vary in quality, regulation and legality; there are over 100 variations of data privacy standards. KYCs, AMLs and the aforementioned GDPR are effectively shrinking the manoeuvering space for companies when it comes to data handling. And a new dimension is entering into the mix: customers expect companies to go the extra mile to protect their personal data.

No unifying solution
And how are businesses handling all this? Apparently they aren’t since security breaches are not a question of “if” anymore but a question of “when” instead.

What’s more, user data is scattered across different platforms; there are no widely agreed upon identifiers that allow data users to link data from two different sources to one specific user profile. Plus, there are no solutions out there that bring together transparency, trust and privacy.

Imagine a world…
Now, wouldn’t it be great if your company could put these problems aside and actually create a revenue stream from the data you gather, instead of just wasting time making sense of it? What we’ve learned is that companies need their user data to become an intangible asset that’s easy and fast to access. Simultaneously, data keeping needs to be as small a business risk as possible when regulation comes into play.

Without reliable customer data a business can hardly adapt to the fast-changing environment. This will only be exacerbated when AI data processing truly kicks in because it will run solely on data. And the higher the quality, the better the results. In short, a company needs reliable and high quality data that is easy to obtain and access, and is not a legal liability.

Pillars of a new partnership
To address these problems we at Datafund are creating an open-source protocol and a decentralised infrastructure for personal data management that will enable companies to:

Create new revenue models instead of stacking costs on their own data.
Get access to a much more comprehensive set of data validated by the customers themselves.
Acquire new customers with lower costs.
Improve business offering and customer retention.
Replace data ownership with data access.
Our protocol should enable companies to guard personal data, provide safe storage and enable provable personal data exchange. An MVP is being tested on a representative set of data together with one of our strategic partners.

By harnessing blockchain technology an uncompromisingly transparent personal data marketplace can be built upon the protocol, where information is shared only on a need-to-know basis according to an agreement between the exchanging parties. This setup will give companies the ability to access customer data more efficiently and enrich it with its own data sets. Such partnership will significantly increase the value of data on both sides, especially in later stages of our project.

Effective use of this new technology can also attract new, tech-savvy customers and increase market reputation as an innovative and fair company that genuinely treats personal data with respect.

In the later stages of implementation the Datafund platform will also include B2B data trading, data as a service and consumer ID management features.

It’s a win-win scenario for all the parties involved — individuals control their data while in return the business side gets high quality data, creates additional revenue streams and relieves itself from regulatory pressures.

If we’ve piqued your interest with this post, head over to our website or join our community and learn more by following us on these channels:
https://t.me/DataFund
https://twitter.com/DataFundProject
https://blog.datafund.net/
https://datafund.io/