Your personal data is an asset. Plenty of companies are using it right now to generate value. Unlike the rest of your assets, however, you probably have no idea where your data is held or how you might quantify it. You have no way to access, manage, or liquidate it. Nobody would accept that lack of control over, say, their financial portfolio. Yet that’s how most people treat their personal data today.
Internet search engine analytics, map queries for directions to the nearest restaurant, blood test results, social media posts—all of it is making money for someone. What’s in it, though, for the people producing the data that earns companies billions of dollars in sales, ad revenue, investments, business intelligence, and other benefits? As it stands, very little.
Apply the same thought experiment to a company. Could a chief executive tell their board and shareholders that the business is producing a valuable product but can’t control or manage it—let alone commercialize it—even while other companies turn that asset into fortunes? No way.
Companies and people generate data today without understanding its true potential. Simultaneously, giants like Alphabet, Amazon.com, and Meta scoop up this data that they didn’t create and profit from it.
Creators’ rights
Digital information should be the property of its creator to oversee and monetize. But while consumers’ every click increasingly benefits someone but themselves, data science and large-scale, low-cost infrastructure for data management hold the potential to upend that model. By harnessing what they contribute to generative AI applications, health data, content creation, and other activities, individuals and companies can leverage tools to receive dividends and build wealth.
People and companies should be able to own, use, and price their data the same way they control money. They only need to define it, quantify it, hold it in a vault, and manage it. Distributed data management and consensus systems, for example, can give individuals and companies ownership and control over their data as if it were a tangible financial asset that can be held in data vaults that are completely under their control
The more people understand that data is an asset, the more readily they’ll see potential in it. They can grant others access to their data or not. They can see who used their information and why. This approach creates new markets. People could be compensated for the time they took to generate their data.
It’s an idea whose time has come. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, for example, which uses the term “commercial surveillance” to describe data tracking and sales, is exploring how to give consumers more control over their information.
To understand the scope of what’s at stake, consider three tech sectors, each undergoing major changes as they mine and market personal data:
The Gen AI bonanza
To create chatbots and other applications, generative artificial intelligence uses large language modules to learn from voice, text, images, and other information scraped off the internet. Generative AI’s expected growth is astounding: from $40 billion in 2022 to $1.3 trillion in 10 years, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
Generative AI is only beginning to revolutionize industries. Before it can gain broad adoption, though, questions about data sourcing and ownership need to be clearer.
It’s difficult to impossible, for instance, to evaluate the provenance, validity, and reputation of the inputs that train generative AI. No widely used system notifies—let alone compensates—data producers.
Consider how a short-lived policy change worked out for Zoom Video Communications. In August, Zoom disclosed that “service-generated data” and “customer content” could be used for AI development. But when X (formerly Twitter) and other companies objected and said they would stop using Zoom’s platform, Zoom said it would ask for users’ permission first instead.
Would video conference users have recourse if they discovered that AI had scraped conversations for trade secrets or other sensitive information and incorporated that data into a profitable product?
Instead, a user’s data vault would control and keep their data on lockdown until the owners open the vault to invited guests who of course must be prepared to pay the price of admission and the ability to audit that comes with that.
Health data
Patients’ medical information is some of the most data-rich on the planet, with a global worth of more than $80 billion by 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights. Patients are arguably being seriously exploited for their data, which is foundational to the research and development of treatments, pharmaceuticals, and other products. The patients whose data leads to new drugs, however, rarely if ever receive compensation.
The tide might be turning, however. The 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 gives patients access to their health records and tightens rules on using their data commercially. People want to share their data freely for scientific research purposes, but they also want to share in the upside when their data are highly valuable, such as when they help lead to the discovery of a blockbuster drug.
Data vaults would solve this dilemma. They could track when users with permission have accessed data and allow for more efficient teamwork. That’s a win for patients, who control the data and profit from sharing it, and a win for researchers, who avoid any ethical or research concerns about the material’s provenance.
Content creation
Everyone is a content creator today, whether they are participating in a social media battle over which fast food company makes the best French fries, or their offhand meme goes viral. Long-planned or spontaneous, content is data that can be packaged and sold.
The film and television industries are facing existential challenges to their business and compensation structures because of this new reality. Artists and writers went on strike in Hollywood, for example, to receive a larger share of the profits that the studios make over time—including through generative AI or other means in the future. The entertainment industry arguably won’t flourish without establishing an acceptable way to value content with these concerns in mind.
The same could apply to architects, engineers, journalists, and fashion designers. Anyone whose product is accessed, again and again, but who sees few long-term benefits from the impact of their daily work should be thinking about the economics of their data.
What if late-night television writers access a social media page that contains an original comedy sketch outline, make it come to life on screen, and produce a blockbuster? What if your company’s building becomes the backdrop for another business’ multimillion-dollar advertising campaign? Tracking and sharing that value in a data vault would solve the foreseeable problems in these examples.
About fair use
Some will turn to the fair-use argument about content: “It was put out there in public,” and move on. But we’re no longer living in a fair-use world. Quite simply, we own what others are using. It’s not being just given away. It’s being taken from us. We shouldn’t be OK with it.
Where’s our profit? In the hands of others. How do we get it back? We need clear and enforceable ownership guidelines and rules. They must include how credit, contents, and profits derived from data can and should be distributed. They also must include perpetual rights for data generators and data owners.
Data vault solutions can put profits in the right hands. Once we treat data for what it is—an asset, just like what’s in our bank and investment accounts—we can make it a meaningful basis of long-term wealth for companies and individuals.
Arka Ray is the cofounder and managing director of The Data Economics Company.
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