With the scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the testimony given by Mark Zuckerberg to the US Congress soon after, we got a more detailed insight on just how Facebook (and, by extension, most social networks) handles and profits with the personal data of its users.
As one would expect, the truth is somewhat gruesome. Facebook captures everything a user writes, on their Facebook page or those of their “friends”, all the photos or videos they post, all their “likes” on the network, everything they share, everything they check, users’ identity with whom they interact, and even their geolocation. If the user authorizes, Facebook can also fetch information from the websites it consults while connected to the social network.
Facebook assures that it does not sell any personally identifiable or aggregated data to its advertisement customers. What it sells is the possibility for an advertiser to reach, among Facebook users, their target audience, thus strongly increasing the effectiveness of a campaign.
This may make any user think that, if Facebook can profit so much with that user’s personal data, is there a way in which can monetize that data instead of leaving all the goods to companies like Facebook and similar ones?
All that used to be hard to achieve, but now TAP Network promises to make it really easier. This universal rewards platform uses the power of the blockchain technology to allow users to harness the power of their data and earn some money with the information from their purchases.
The process is quite simple, really – consumers get rewards for shopping in any of the 250,000+ partners that are part of the network, with those rewards possibly getting to 10%. Then, consumers have the option to store their personal shopping preferences in smart contracts, which becomes available for those partners.
Then, whenever any partner uses that data to directly promote to users using that information, the respective user gets rewarded as well. These rewards can be redeemed next to those partners, which is effectively a way to monetize one’s personal data.
In an age where social networks dominate a big chunk of the Internet and users have almost no choice other than allowing them to scavenge almost any personal data, having a platform like TAP Network that allows users to take control over their personal information and even monetize it is surely a much needed breath of fresh air in this subject.