The old data economy is defined as “a global digital ecosystem in which data is gathered, organized, and exchanged by a network of vendors for the purpose of deriving value from the accumulated information“. The old data economy represents the trillions of dollars being generated by companies that collects, sells and derive insights from your data without your consent, and with no regards to data ownership or privacy. Worse, these companies do not pay you for the profit they have generated from the use of your data.
Currently the winners in this data economy are tech companies who use your data to derive information about you in order to facilitate delivery of targeted ads to you. They make huge profits using the information derived from the digital footprint you generate online connecting with old friends, searching for new food recipes, booking travel destinations, or sharing photos of a new outfit.
The new data economy democratizes data ownership and privacy while changing the power dynamic between people and tech companies. Today big tech collects your data to derive insights from it by using machine learning models that spits out predictions about you. They develop proprietary algorithms that allow Google for example, to index the web to deliver search results or TikTok to recommend the next video they predict you are most likely to watch. Theses algorithms are useless without the data needed to train them. By allowing people to own their data, companies like OOTech are removing the need for proprietary machine learning models since every company would have access to the same global pool of data and the owner is always in control.
In the new data economy, companies looking to buy insights on a specific demographic would use a platform built with our OOProtocol to ask a question, specify which algorithm to use, provide a few extra parameters and retrieve insights that can be used to make better business decisions. The algorithm specified would be retrieved from an open source global repository and deployed locally on the devices who have sold access to their data. In the new data economy, people sell access to their data and not their actual data. Training and insight both happen on the individual’s device using differential privacy, then these individual insights are aggregated and genericized before being processed further into reports returned to the business.
Giving companies the tools to purchase business insights and to pay people who provided access to the data used to generate that insight, rewards our customers, the Loopers for participating in this growing new data economy. Loopers earn income by using OOLoop to selectively sell access to their data to Builders (entrepreneurs, business managers and policy makers) seeking to gain business insights rather than selling their data to companies and losing control over ownership and privacy.