It’s no secret that we has seen an increase in global awareness on data ownership and privacy in the past few years. A recent IBM study found that 81% of consumers say they have become increasingly concerned about how their data is used online. Companies like Apple make privacy a cornerstone of their marketing campaigns and they consider their approach to be a competitive advantage. When privacy laws like GDPR, PIPEDA and CCPA took effect, it gave people the right to know what companies know about them as well as the right to block the sale of their information to others. This created a market for privacy expertise and software products that can help users scrub their personal data and to enable business to comply with new privacy laws.
This list of the nearly 300 companies selling privacy services is testament to the idea that users should have more control over their own data. The first unicorn in enterprise privacy software, OneTrust, was valued at $1.3 billion by venture capitalists in a fundraising round in 2019. Other startups are focused on selling privacy services directly to consumers instead of corporate clients.
The app Jumbo was launched in 2019, promising to simplify the privacy settings on sites like Facebook. Israeli startup Mine, an AI-based platform that promises to help people become owners of their personal data is on a mission to empower their users to discover their own digital footprint and have access to what the internet knows about them. It also allows their users to specify where their data should or shouldn’t be. A London company digi.me helps consumers import and consolidate data generated through social media and health or fitness devices to provide insights usually not available to the consumer.
People have little to no control over their own data and the tech landscape if filled with startups addressing this challenge. One approach is to help existing companies become compliant with privacy regulations. Other approaches involve providing people with visibility into their own digital footprint. At OOTech Inc. I have been working on a unique approach that uses our OOProtocol to optimize ownership of your data by giving people like you granular control over your digital world through ownership, privacy and storage location settings.
I believe that it is a fundamental human right to own and have granular privacy & storage location control over the data you generate. Didier Dorélien
Data Ownership
Data ownership is the act of having legal control over data that you generate. It defines your ability to possess, use, assign, share, destroy, sell, trade, or donate data or surrender all of these privileges to a third party like a parent, care giver or legal guardian.
Data Privacy
Data privacy describes a practice that ensures people have granular control over who can access their data and if they do decide to share, their data is only used for its intended purpose. Privacy implies that the data owner has sole control over who can access their data. The latest security protocols are used to encrypt the data to prevent unwanted access.
Data Storage
Data storage controls is our way of giving people full visibility over where their data is physically located whether their data is on the device in their hands, a private sever at home or at their office or on a public cloud server somewhere in the world. Storage location settings enables people to control the cloud service provider and the cloud server’s geographic location.
If data ownership, privacy and storage location controls had been implemented at a company like TikTok for example it would have been easier for American users to confirm that their data was stored on servers physically located in the United States and control who had access to their data.