Tuesday, June 12, 2012

A Dollar For Your Data


Leber, Jessica. "A Dollar For Your Data." Technology Review, June 8, 2012.
  
From the article: "Unless your name is Oprah Winfrey or Warren Buffett, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to pay $1,000 to hear about your purchasing habits. Anyone who wants this information can glean much of it from your behavior on the Internet anyway. Companies tracking and aggregating our clicks, taps, and swipes are the ones making fortunes. Individuals are not.

But a startup called Personal thinks it can change this. Its starting point is an idea that may seem strange to the Facebook generation: an online network where users control what information advertisers can access….Users of the network, launched last November, are encouraged to upload information of all sorts, trivial (pizza orders) or sensitive (student loan records, medical prescriptions). They place the data in a "vault" and can grant other people or Web programs access to relevant portions. You could enter your home alarm code and share it only with houseguests, or grant a financial advisor access to details about your retirement accounts." Read more