Data Unions

= "it is up to the individual to decide which Data Unions are permitted to sell their information, putting a greater emphasis on privacy, transparency, and user control" [1]

Context

Michel Bauwens:

"I believe we have 3 major options around data: 1) the current privatisation of personal data by netarchical firms 2) the libertarian solution of data unions, seeing data as exclusively individual (see below); and 3) the data commons / data cooperative approach, which sees data as relational and collective since they nearly always link individuals to each other."

Description

Tom Hamilton (Streamr):

"A Data Union is a framework, currently being built on the Streamr Marketplace, that allows people to easily bundle and sell their real-time data and earn revenue. On its own, our data does not hold much value, but when combined in a Data Union, it aggregates into an attractive product for buyers to extract insights. This is crowdselling, and has the potential to generate unique data sets by incentivising trade directly from the data producers.

What problem do Data Unions solve?

Most of the data generated by smart devices is stored in silos by the companies who provide our apps and devices. By making this information more accessible through trade, and incentivising the creation of new data points, an individual data economy can be stimulated and technologies such as those imagined in IoT might be realised." (https://medium.com/streamrblog/what-are-data-unions-how-do-they-work-which-ones-can-i-use-887e67fb7716)