"It is a new problem, 30 years ago there were two to three credit scoring companies that might have had a file on you but these days, files of data are strewn all over the place." A 2017 study published in the Internet Policy Review reported there are "data marketing clouds" which gather and sell an "exhaustive amount" of personal information, including credit card usage patterns, consumption data, and even TV viewing habits. Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, demonstrates the company's credit card reader. Credit:Luis Ascui Google can link credit card transactions with data it collects from Google Maps, Gmail and YouTube to make a profile it can sell to advertisers. A recent Google-funded study showed more than 900 digital interactions led one person to lease a car. The two general approaches to controlling personal data online are via government regulation, which may stifle innovation, or by giving people access to their information, Mr McKelvey said.

Europeans have the right to access and transport their data, which is generally the right thing to do, but the problem with that is people may alter it and fabricate things, he said. "A project [Invisibly] that I've been working on for two years now, is a way to allow people to see the files that are used to create their media and pay for their media," Mr McKelvey said. "When I say create I mean all the stuff you watch online is advertising supported, a very small number of subscriptions being the exception, and right now that [advertising] ecosystem is completely broken. It is not paying for journalists or people who invest in quality content. "Part of fixing that is allowing people to take control over their online identities for the purposes of consuming better advertising." Most advertising dollars are "hoovered up" by Google and Facebook, partially because they know who you are better than all the other middlemen in the ad market, he said.

"There are probably 400 companies that represent the intermediaries in your typical online advertising ecosystem. But typically seven are involved at any time in any transaction," Mr McKelvey said. "So if you follow the money from when an advertiser pays for an ad to what the poor publisher sees as revenue for having delivered the viewer, 70 per cent of the money is eaten up by middlemen. That’s why we’re losing newspapers." Meanwhile, Australian online advertising revenue is growing, recording a 7 per cent year-on-year increase to March 2018 with total revenue almost $8 billion. 2017 Australian online advertising revenue. Credit:iab Australia / PwC Online Advertising Expenditure Report "We need more money going to people who invest resources into making the stuff we put into our brains, not just news - TV, art, magazines, film, music and radio," Mr McKelvey said.

"The trick is to allow users to pay more for great content and to pay way less for crap." His company, Invisibly, works by assigning micropayments to content after a person "pays" for access to a consortium of publishers (currently more than 2000 have signed up to trial the software) by revealing what they would like to buy or are interested in. For example, if you need new furniture and you share that with Invisibly and it generates higher-value ad impressions for furniture makers, so each ad is more valuable than the random banner ads currently displayed on some sites. That ad revenue is then passed on to each of the publishers whose content is viewed for free. "We've been at it for two years and we think the product will be noticeable in 2019 but we're already deploying part of our code," Mr McKelvey said. "We are still building the coalition [of publishers] as we build the software and nobody knows if it's going to work.