Data Control and monetization
Preference on importance of data, world-shifting in digital platform, ownership of data, consent culture in sharing digital data, advertisement industry
Have you searched for something on google and seen an ad about it in messenger? Do you know the role of Facebook in election and political campaigns? Who gets to control our data? If yes, you know about the increasing cases of data harvesting, sharing, and targeting in current times. Personal and agency data have been collected by advertisers, politicians, and many more for their personal benefits. And it all comes back to one thing i.e. “data monetization”
Data monetization is simply the process of using data for economic benefits. In the process of data monetization, there are always two parties being involved, one party who has access to data and the other one who wants to have access to data. The advertisement industry is a combination of data and monetization.
Tech giant industries have such a massive power brought by the data they possess of ours. When the world digitally shifted at such a rapid rate, people were confused about the ownership of digital data and they still are. I would like to take this analogy to explain the concept of data ownership, just like how dry cleaners don’t take our cloth and sell it to someone else because we are using their service for dry cleaning — some applications or web services also can’t take your digital data and sell it to someone else.
What’s the big deal if they take my name and image, right? The problem is not about taking data, taking data from users has multiple good purposes for example: providing the services, making the user experience very smooth, recommendations, and many more. But the problem is if our data is not in our control and there is no consent culture while sharing data.
The monetization of data is an enormous application of data usage. It can be done in the form of advertisement, using data as a service, analysis as a service, building data-driven business models, and many more. Advertising revenue of global media reached 763.2 billion dollars in 2021 [source: statista] and this is one of the highest revenue industries globally.
2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced per day. These data are spliced, slattered, and consolidated among collaborators, research, advertisers, and governments. This ambient, ongoing accumulation of data breaches the consent of consumers and citizens and other multiple human rights. This is huge!
When the advertisement industry started to shift gradually from the physical world to the digital world, there was again massive confusion among people about targeted ads. People started seeing ads about the things that they search online (in cross-platform) and that brings a controversial opinion to the discussion. I have heard people say that they don’t mind seeing advertisements for things they have searched or talked about because they can actually end up finding the things they want. I have also heard the bigger concern from people that realized how my data is being transferred to target ads from another platform. So this discussion always brings us to one question, who gets to control our data?
Most of us are aware of the 2019 facebook election scandal where Facebook(now Meta) was accused of selling data for political campaigns and election manipulation. When we talked about the data control above, we forgot to talk about the forced psychological behavior it brings to people. To manipulate someone’s behavior for a political campaign is a whole new level of data control that facebook (now Meta) was accused of.
Data is one of the most powerful resources in the current digital era. From its utility in simple research to find trends and big analysis, data has always been a crucial asset. Data can be used in various ways to generate revenues. However, it is equally important to know the ownership of data and the control we have over it. Different people can have different preferences in the importance of data — some may feel financial data, some may feel medical data, some may feel personal data. but we all are here for a common fight, who gets to control our data?
Co-authored by: Sushobhan Chimoriya
