Online companies and apps make a lot of money on user data, but consumers don’t see any of it. Ad tech firm Freckle IoT wants to change that. It has launched a blockchain-based app called Killi that allows consumers to deliberately hand over their data or participate in marketing surveys in exchange for financial compensation.
The Toronto-based company offers applications that help companies measure how their online ad campaigns affect in-store sales. Clients include Coca Cola, Lowe’s, Walmart, General Motors, Unilever and Mondelēz.
Freckle IoT has been offering Killi on Apple’s App Store and Google Play and formally announced the app Tuesday.
Consumers who download it can opt in to share their data with brands that work with Freckle IT. In return, they will get paid each time their data is purchased. The contract between brand and consumer will be written on a blockchain and is therefore both secure and unchangeable, the company says. Users can also get paid by participating in surveys.
Concerned Consumers
Killi is coming to market not long after Facebook faced a huge outcry over the way its user data were gathered by research firm Cambridge Analytica to deliver targeted messages during the most recent U.S. presidential election. Meanwhile, companies such as Equifax and Yahoo! have lost millions of customer records. More recently, the European Union launched the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires any firm doing business in or with the EU to follow much stricter opt-in policies for using consumer data.
If popular, the app will not only address data privacy issues but help market the value of blockchain itself.
“I wasn’t expecting Cambridge Analytica or the Equifax hack, but I was expecting the general theme of that to happen,” Freckle IoT CEO Neil Sweeney tells ThirtyK. “It sort of solidified that consumers care about privacy. There is this widely held belief that the new generation doesn’t care about privacy, but I don’t think that’s true. When you start to shine the light on how people’s data was used, people were freaked out.”
Killi won’t protect consumers from how their data is collected or used by other apps, so consumers still need to be wise in managing their privacy settings for them.
