How do people sell their data? Individuals have certainly tried — offering it up on eBay is one tactic that goes all the way back to the year 2000. But almost two decades on from that early attempt, and despite the fact that the personal data market is worth tens of billions, there is still no convenient and scalable way for people to retail their digital information. And when we’re talking about real-time data, this problem is amplified.

What’s missing is:

A very simple way to push data to those who want it

An obvious venue for product discovery

A way for individuals to pool their data to attract commercial buyers and compete with professional data brokers.

This lack of a decent solution for individuals has meant that, until now, data giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon have been able to capture the personal data market by aggregating large volumes of data from individual users, and then amalgamating these feeds into products they can easily retail to big data buyers, usually in a closed shop fashion.

Far too often, this data oligarchy has operated without the informed consent of their users. And of course even though it’s their data that’s being sold, users don’t get to see the money in their pockets.

Lots of passionate thinkers and technologists such as Jaron Lanier, Glen Weyl + Eric Posner, Jeremy Rifkin and most recently Yuval Noah Harari and Tim Berners-Lee, have advocated for a fairer data economy where users are directly remunerated for the value they are creating¹. So far, the biggest change to data markets has come from lawmakers in the shape of GDPR. The legislation’s intention was to rebalance control between these data giants and end users. But the law won’t change the underlying fundamentals. Only technology can. Because this is fundamentally a technological problem.

Welcome to Crowdselling with Data Unions

Streamr project contributors, including myself, have been openly talking about Data Unions (formally Community Products), our solution to these issues, for a few months now. This is something that wasn’t on Streamr’s original project roadmap, but we knew at the start of last year that if our platform was going to give people genuine ownership of their data, this kind of feature would have to be built.

Henri Pihkala at Consensus in May 2018 talking about how individuals need to own their data

So what is a Data Union? First and foremost, a Data Union is a data product that sits on the Streamr Marketplace. Like other products, such as this real-time pollution feed from over 60 countries, it will contain a number of data streams that are pushed from multiple sources.

What makes a Data Union different from other Marketplace products is the underlying opt-in data sourcing and revenue sharing mechanics. For the first time, end users can push the data they create to a larger saleable product and receive automatic payment every time that product sells. This represents a new and unique feature for the real-time data industry — what we’re calling crowdselling.

Crowdsource — people pool their knowledge to solve a common problem Crowdfund — people pool their resources to fund a common endeavour Crowdsell — people pool their property to enable a common transaction

Let me give you a few definite examples of how crowdselling through a Data Union on the Streamr Marketplace will work. Over the last few months, one of Streamr project’s talented community members, Gang Liu, has been figuring out how to push data from his personal Fitbit to a product he created on the Streamr Marketplace. You can view his early output here. Gang then went on to develop an app that would backend his code. That app now allows anyone to push their own personal Fitbit data to their own Marketplace product in a few easy steps.

Quick tutorial for Gang Liu’s Fitbit app

Without a way of combining all these Fitbit streams into one easy to purchase data product, there is unlikely to be any future for these multiple individual streams on the Marketplace. But by combining them into one product, multiple Fitbit users could produce big enough data sets to interest serious data buyers. This is what Data Unions achieves.

Streamr Labs has been working on a second example; a mobile prototype app that can pseudonymously send your phone’s GPS location data to the Marketplace. You can see it being tested by its co-developer Riku Ruokonen in the video below. All users will have to do is download the app to their smartphone and follow a few basic steps. After that, their data will be pushed to a dedicated Data Union where it will be offered, aggregated with other streams, for sale. (We expect to distribute an MVP app to members of the Streamr community in early summer).

Riku Ruokonen testing out the Trackr app

These are just a few examples out of potentially 1000's. (We expect our partnership with Electrify and their PowerPod to lead to another such Data Union). Anything that generates digital information on behalf of a decent number of individuals — browsers, smart watches, Teslas — can be usefully integrated into a Data Union.