This woman wants you to get paid for your streaming media data

Governments are finally beginning to let consumers control how their personal information is used by companies. Angela Benton is going further: Streamlytics, which she founded in 2018, not only helps individuals learn what major companies know about them and demand its deletion and portability—via its GetMyData.io service—but it also lets them get paid for their info. In April, Benton launched another project (with the help of investor Issa Rae), called Clture. It transforms the video and audio people stream on such platforms as Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify into a license proving that they own that data. Then Clture pays the user an up-front fee for it. The data is made anonymous and goes into Streamlytics’s API, where clients, many of them streaming companies, pay an annual sum to access it. “The consumer was just a cog in a wheel,” she says, “even though they are literally the backbone of many of these companies.” Originally pitched to Black consumers (because “they are the culture,” Benton says), the product is designed for everyone. In its first week, it processed more than 4 million data points—such as a user’s activity broken down by artist, genre, etc.—and customers earned up to $100.