We all know that our personal data is very valuable to marketers and advertisers. For monetization purposes, the vast majority of the popular social media services run on centralized architecture in which the third party service provider grants privileges to the end users to use its service.

Facebook has a license to use your content in any way it sees fit and it would start using data from Whatsapp to allow advertisers to better target those users on Facebook and Instagram, in addition to allowing businesses to send messages to WhatsApp users directly.

Twitter can pass any of your content to any partner organizations for any reason.

Dropbox can share your data with trusted parties to provide their existing services. And the list goes on.

A professional network service like Linkedin is used by business individuals to establish and maintain professional contacts and a way to either find work or get ahead in career as well as gain resources and opportunities for networking.

As with any social network site, there are privacy and security issues with LinkedIn. You typically reveal a lot more personal information in your LinkedIn profile than you would in your Facebook or Instagram profile.

Your LinkedIn profile is more like a digital resume where you can showcase your talents, share information such as where you’ve worked, where you’ve gone to school, and what projects you’ve worked on throughout your career. The problem is that some of the information in your LinkedIn profile might be fall into the wrong hands.

Even worse, employers have increasingly relied on social media to screen potential job applicants and even terminate employees based on their digital paper trail. And that practice has led to discrimination. So now employees, regardless of their field, are at risk for being fired based on their online presence.

Five years ago LinkedIn was hacked and 6,5 million user accounts were stolen by cybercriminals. Later on it was discovered that an additional 100 million LinkedIn email databases and hashed passwords being sold on a black market. This prompted LinkedIn to alert its 400 million users to stay alert and maintain reasonable passwords.

So how Indorse can help resolve these concerning issues?

There are three problems that become the main focus of Indorse:

Economic problem: Members of the social network should be able to reap the rewards of the information they produce. Autonomy problem: Platform providers should not have an almost unlimited licence; it opens the door to potential abuses. Trust problem: The trust problem is the result of the concentration of power in the hands of the platform providers.

Indorse is the first decentralized professional network platform which uses internal rewards (Indorse Rewards) and a reputation system (Indorse Score) to incentivize members to add their skills or accomplishments and indorse those of others.

Through participation in the platform, members are able to earn Indorse Rewards for sharing more about themselves and for indorsing the claims of others. Advertisers in turn purchase space on the platform with cryptographic Indorse Tokens ( IND tokens ). A portion of these IND tokens are shared with the members who created the content. In the end, members are finally able to receive rewards due to their data, instead of watching passively as the revenue goes to companies holding their data.

This is revolutionary! Have you ever tried to imagine how companies like Facebook or Instagram become so successful? It’s because of people like you and me, the community who provided them with daily and useful contents about anything in our life. Ironically, we didn’t even get a small piece of that “cake”.

You are not a product. It is your life, your story and you should be rewarded for yourself.

The beauty of Indorse is that people can build their reputation and benefit from it. Proof your skills, get endorsed and showcase them.

With a decentralized platform, Indorse’s Reputation system, can then be used to check on the credentials of a person and verify it before making any important decision like hiring or assigning a project.

This is not an era where professionals only looking to publish their skills which are certified by trusted institutions or where they have gone to school.

It’s now a new era where people can show what they have actually done in their professional and personal lives, like winning a chess tournament, playing guitar or anything!

Data monetization is not about selling your data

Providers of social networks have turned to advertising as a revenue stream, doing so by requiring members to assign rights to their content and information to the provider and selling them to advertisers and recruiters.

With Indorse, people now have a choice whether to advertise their personal information, with full control over their data.

Indorse wants you to own your own data, not to give it away.