Are You Aware Of User Side Personal Data Trading

There are some traditional companies out there on the web world who really works by respecting people’s data as currency and putting its management in the hands of consumers. There do exist the threatening tracking, behavioral targeting, marketing and advertising companies, who are into tracking and purchasing users’ data for the online advertising industry.

Personal information enables pin-pointing on personal context, which in turn spells relevant, and translates to targeted offerings and ads. The interests of providers and consumers are not that contradictory. Whereas providers look at users, the consumer, and want ROI (Return On Investment) for targeting users with relevant offers. But at Icentered, we believe user is looking at ROA (Return On Attention), and may be open to what, in their context that interests them.

With the shifts in internet marketing, these interests will have to evolve. 'We'the consumers are changing and so should marketing discourse. Users are moving to pull based models; they own conversations and change loyalties by a simple click away.  Providers and advertisers are welcome to directly ask and get our cooperation and responses.

From an Icentered point of view – reversing the paradigm is natural. User’s data, user’s context, are their own. Users actually own it and they are the only one who can proactively manage their privacy and sharing. The economics of user context – Contextonomics is a currency, yet no one has the right, unsolicited, to infiltrate user’s spheres, monitor their actions and patterns and hover around, manipulating their personal data.

A Wall street Journal article describes several start-up initiatives that start catering for user centered needs and empower active trading of personal data by users.

There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, companies like Myid, Intelliprotect, Abine, that block online tracking, together with privacy groups and federated identity initiatives, represent the user side privacy protection and give privacy management services to prevent companies from viewing results of tracking data, without direct consumer consent.

On the other side, companies like Personal Inc, i-allow pay people a commission on their consent to share their data with marketers and advertisers.

These companies are pioneering initiatives that cater directly for user centered data on their behalf.  That, in itself is a significant move towards a real user centered marketing paradigm.

Treating data as currency does not end in placing individuals as partners in food chains created around them. Contextualization mechanisms are not ripe yet to allow for context based transactions that exceed observation of raw data.

Once user side contextualization will mature, it can evolve to serve as alternative currency, in the struggle over a user’s’ attention.