Source: iStock/AdrianHancu

Following the privacy concerns raised by the Facebook fiasco, major companies are proposing a new solution: letting customers control, and if they wish sell, their own data. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, an American IT company, and Nokia, a Finnish IT and consumer electronics company, among others, unveiled partnerships with a Swiss startup called Streamr to build a marketplace for data atop a blockchain.

At the Consensus conference in New York this week, the companies talked about their plan to allow consumers to put their data on the blockchain and possibly make money by selling it to a wide range of organizations, from advertisers to governments, interested in buying it. The data would be collected by a wide range of devices connected to the internet. Streamr intends to tokenize the data. Their token is called the DATAcoin, or DATA, and raised USD 30 million in their initial coin offering last year.

Per Fortune, Raphael Davison, HPE’s worldwide director for blockchain, commented on the company’s previous endeavours to store data from cars on blockchains and sell it to companies who need it, from gas companies to those providing weather warnings taken out of windshield wiper activity. “The data that’s stored in your car is extremely valuable and right now us drivers just give it away,” he explained. “This kind of technology with blockchain allows you to have control over it, and therefore you control it, you can monetize it.”

Nokia, meanwhile, wants Streamr to help them put data collected from the company’s “base spots” on the blockchain, according to Fortune. “Farmers want to have a weather station - they might also want to sell that data,” says Martti Ylikoski, radio system evolution lead at Nokia.