Somewhere out on the web, your data is being sold to marketing companies whether you know it or not. Shouldn’t you get paid for it?
Enter UBDI, one of many startups looking to monetize personal data without spilling it into dark markets and the hands of data brokers.
The D.C.-based company launched in September 2018, and is in the midst of a seed funding round. It’s aiming to build an online community based off the Digi.me data privacy platform where people can willingly provide data to companies in exchange for a stake in the proceeds.
When users sign up, they can pull personal data from sites and apps using Digi.me, which allows people to see and share data collected about them by corporations. UBDI’s clients then conduct market research using user data and responses, and those users will be grouped through different interests and segments. Users are compensated with cash and blockchain-based tokens, which companies need to purchase to conduct their market research.
It's all part of what UBDI calls a "universal basic data income," where people can control and constantly monetize their own data instead of having it traded by third parties. And privacy is paramount, co-founder Mark Kilaghbian said.
“[Companies] don’t see individual data. You have a private key with Digi.me and can choose to share that with UBDI, so the raw data is not leaving your device – it stays on your phone and only you have access,” he said. “Then we extract bits and pieces of data in aggregate, which are valuable without knowing who you are.”
That aggregation is key to the startup’s business model, allowing users to keep identifiable data private while still offering value to them and to clients.
The other key is tokenization of rewards for users, which allows the value of contributions to rise as more users contribute and more companies use the data.
“We’re trying to give people the same capitalized value that a company like Facebook might have derived from user data put into it,” co-founder and CEO Dana Budzyn said. “Ultimately, together it’s most valuable, so we can make sure people in the community have a measure of the value they are getting. The token is a way of measuring the contribution of users.”
A beta version of the UBDI community went live in March, but it’s adding clients and research studies before allowing users to start contributing and earning tokens. Its first study aims to include about 1,000 responses, which Kilaghbian companies are willing to pay up to $75,000 for. And demand is high.
“Companies are lining up to do studies,” Kilaghbian said. “They want to do research but they don’t want to be holding the data, and they don’t currently have timely data or verified responses.”
UBDI now has a team of eight employees, and just moved into an office space in D.C.’s Glover Park area. Within the next month, Budzyn said, it plans to add 1,000 more people to its beta testing and hopefully scale to 50,000 users by the end of the year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27PdSnusCQ
