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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Startup Pays to Sell Your Data

 BIGtoken, a Westlake Village-based data marketplace, plans to offer users the option to cash-out in cryptocurrency for the sale of their personal data. The opt-in marketplace – which allows users to sign up to share their data with third-party marketing agencies and brands in exchange for payment – is attempting to reconfigure the issues of data, user privacy and the marketing industry.

Users of BIGtoken are rewarded for the information they share with the service through completion of data-producing tasks with BIGtoken points. Tasks vary but include answering demographic and market research surveys, enabling location services, scanning receipts, linking to social media accounts and tethering banking accounts for data harvesting. Users earn points based on the market value of the data provided. Points are, unless otherwise specified, worth one cent and each action can earn anywhere from 1 to 2,500 points in the app, based on the complexity of the tasks and the information provided.George Stella, co-founder and chief revenue officer, said the points themselves act almost as a form of cryptocurrency. Users can convert their points into Amazon.com Inc. gift cards, PayPal Inc. credit or donations to nonprofits such as the American Heart Association. Next, the company plans to make crypto-conversion available alongside the other redemption options.“What we like to say is we are crypto-adjacent with the vision to move towards being crypto-centric,” Stella said. “Pretty soon we’re going to offer the ability to redeem in Bitcoin.” As part of the pursuit to become crypto-centric, BIGtoken teased the Bitcoin connection on Twitter and launched its 'BIGtoken Crypto’ accounts, a meetup group called Crypto Mondays and a weekly crypto news roundup, dedicated to news and updates surrounding cryptocurrency, posted to its blog.

Fans of the service lauded the move to redeem in Bitcoin, despite its to-be-determined launch date.BIGtoken became publicly traded through a reverse merger with Force Protection Video Equipment Corp. in February, as part of the company’s mission to have the service as consumer-managed as possible. The stock saw a slight surge after the initial announcement and have leveled since. Shares closed on April 7 at $0.02 cents.Stella declined to comment on the merger or stock, except to say it has “been great.” Shares still trade under the Forced Protection name.

Valuable dataAdvertising agencies and major brand companies, such as Kraft-Heinz Co. and Anheuser-Busch Cos., neither of which responded to requests for comment for this article, partner with BIGtoken to purchase groups of anonymized user data for targeted campaigns and market research.

Last year, BIGtoken partnered with Publicis Groupe, one of the largest marketing and communications companies in the world, to conduct market research about how customers planned to celebrate Mother’s Day amid the pandemic.

Using audience insights, the website boasts that brands are able to access personal data from more than 16 million users in 30+ countries within hours. In an interview with the Business Journal, Stella indicated BIGtoken has “about 9 million verified users.” Most brands begin using BIGtoken on a test-and-learn basis, according to Stella, with pricing beginning at $150,000 to $300,000 for initial data sets and scaling up from there, depending on the type of data purchased. Demographic data, such as gender and age, are less valuable than location data or survey responses.

BIGtoken differs from other data aggregate sites and methods in that each action by users is opt-in, as opposed to cookies and other web-monitoring services that require users to opt-out. In this way, Stella said, the company has been able to easily navigate regulatory and legislative changes surrounding the gathering of user data.

“We’re future proof. We are compliant in every way,” Stella said. “And my position is that the more regulation the better for us, because we feel like as more regulations come down, we think the competition becomes thinner and thinner to the point where we’re basically the only ones left. You know, the permission-based, opt-in, first-party model is going to be the one to survive the regulations.”Privacy experts agree the opt-in model offers some protection for users who are worried about the spread of their information, but there are still concerns surrounding the aggregation and sale of such data.

“It’s an interesting idea to allow people to monetize their own data and then to share a portion of that revenue with the individual,” Paul Witman, director of California Lutheran University’s Masters in Information Technology program in Thousand Oaks, said in an interview. “But there are significant risks involved.”In addition to phishing attempts against users used to gain access to their accounts or attacks against BIGtoken’s data storage system to access data there, even anonymous data may not stay anonymized. In theory, if user data were specific enough, Witman said, there is a risk of it being ‘de-anonymized’ through process of elimination. Given enough specific data points about demographics and location, there may only be a small number of people who meet all of the data points, possibly revealing their identity. In the app terms of service, BIGtoken states the application may collect identifiable information such as name, physical address, email address, image, telephone number, Social Security number or other national identification number.

The application’s privacy policy indicates that users provide information to BIGtoken at their own risk and that, while every effort will be made to keep data safe, “(the company is) not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures used in connection with the platform.” Users who do not agree with the terms of service are encouraged to delete their account and remove the application from their phone or device.

“Our mission is clear – it’s to allow consumers to own and monetize their data,” Stella said. “And our philosophy is clear as well, data privacy is a basic human right.”

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert is a Los Angeles-based reporter covering retail, hospitality and philanthropy for the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. In addition to her current beat, she is particularly interested in criminal justice topics, health and science stories and investigative journalism. She received her AA in Humanities from Moorpark College in 2016, her BA in Communication from Cal Lutheran University in 2019 and followed it up with a MA in Specialized Journalism from USC in the summer of 2020. Through her work, Katherine aspires to help strengthen the fragile trust between members of the media and the public.

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