By now it sounds like an old story, but it is important to remind you one of the unmentioned facts of daily life of 2018, the fact that all you’re spending data is being collected by the big credit card companies, stored, and then traded for cold hard cash,bought by advertisers of all kinds to create insights into your spending habits and target consumers that might fit the product sold. The laws around the matter still lag behind the reality, where it seems normal that when passing by a store, your phone suddenly beeps with an ad for this exact same store, making you realize the integration of data points has really gone to the next level - your phone location is now known to your credit card company or even another company with access to your credit card
information, and it uses it to make you offers when you pass by one of their paying customers. All of this leads to an inevitable, and some people might even say obvious - conclusion, which is, that consumers have lost control over how personal data is being collected and used by companies.
,A Forbes article from a year ago titled “ where can you buy big data ” the main data brokers are discussed, a plan by Nielsen, one of those heavy weights , is to make it’s retail database, known as the consumer packaged goods,publicly available for a fee.
A similar company, Equifax, was dealing in consumer personal information (such as sexual orientation) as early as the 1970’s, the company argued that they could predict consumer behavior based on such information with more precision, they hold information about some 800 million people worldwide.The company is also the epicenter of one of the world’s most comprehensive data breaches yet, with two of them occurring between march and july of 2017 - bringing the information to potential use in extortion by various hacker groups
Adding insult to injury, the revenue created by all this data gathering is not being shared with you as a user,while you are the creator and originator of this information, and are not paying you anything to access this treasure.
A blockchain backed solution
Rubiix, the social spending app is planning to change this. By introducing a purely opt-in based system of sharing consumer data with the brands, the Rubiix app allows consumers to receive a share of the marketing revenue of the brands when participating in campaigns and sharing their data with the brands through the app.The beginning is already here, 10,000 users have already downloaded the app and have made purchases using it about 10 million times.This unique approach recognizes the role consumers have in creating valuable information and their ownership of it, and thus their right to get paid for letting companies and brands have access to it, which is quite a novelty in this sector.