Sushant Kumar at LiveMint: “Business models that thrive on user data have created profitable global technology companies. For comparison, market capitalization of just three tech companies, Google (Alphabet), Facebook and Amazon, combined is higher than the total market capitalization of all listed firms in India. Almost 98% of Facebook’s revenue and 84% of Alphabet’s come from serving targeted advertising powered by data collected from the users. No doubt, these tech companies provide valuable services to consumers. It is also true that profits are concentrated with private corporations and societal value for contributors of data, that is, the user, can be much more significant….
In the existing economic construct, private firms are able to deploy top scientists and sophisticated analytical tools to collect data, derive value and monetize the insights.
Imagine if personalization at this scale was available for more meaningful outcomes, such as for administering personalized treatment for diabetes, recommending crop patterns, optimizing water management and providing access to credit to the unbanked. These socially beneficial applications of data can generate undisputedly massive value.
However, handling critical data with accountability to prevent misuse is a complex and expensive task. What’s more, private sector players do not have any incentives to share the data they collect. These challenges can be resolved by setting up specialized entities that can manage data—collect, analyse, provide insights, manage consent and access rights. These entities would function as a trusted intermediary with public purpose, and may be named “data stewards”….(More)”.
See also: http://datastewards.net/ and https://datacollaboratives.org/