As we all know by now, the business landscape has drastically changed over the last years. New forms of business models and value propositions have emerged from new digital players, disrupting both industries and customers habits. One of the key elements of their success is the effortless access to their customers’ personal data, which helps them to improve their products or to personalize their services. At the time of their implementation, those practices were not suspected by users, and companies could benefit from the wide of applications it offered. Until recently..
In April 2016, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union agreed on a new regulation aiming to help citizens to gain back control over their personal data, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, 2016). Before this unprecedented regulation, big digital corporations had almost no barriers to use the data provided by users, as most of the laws in place at the time were vague and outdated. Everything changed in May 2018, when the GDPR came into action in the European Union (EU).
From now on, internet users have an exclusive right to access, rectify, erase and share their personal data. A British start-up, Yo-Da (short for Your Data), is now proposing a new way for users to benefit from the data that is being collected about them (Yo-Da, 2018). Precisely, the company is enabling every citizen to take actions regarding those rights:
- Right to Access: Yo-Da makes the necessary requests to companies to gather personal information stored in their database and allows the user to know which companies are selling his or her data without knowing.
- Right to Rectify: the application allows the user to modify data that is not accurate, enabling him/her to better control and understand his/her data.
- Right to Erase: it even allows the user to delete sensitive data that could put him/her at risk. Yo-Do will in return ask any company operating in Europe to delete the information.
- Right of Data Portability: the application presents to the user the data in an understandable manner and allow him/her to share his or her data to external parties.
The last one, the right to data portability, represents the core of their business model. As Yo-Da connects itself to an array of databases, it is able to gather all sorts of data in one unique system. The crossing of different types of data can yield further insights that both companies and users could benefit from. (Take a look at the video to have an example)
On one side, by monetizing the access to his or her data, the user could have a better control over the information being shared, as well as finally being rewarded for the extremely useful information he/she’s been providing companies for decades.
On the other side, Yo-Da could enable businesses to gain greater insights about their customers and better target their services, by building on data that they wouldn’t have necessarily access before. Another outcome could be more trust among customers regarding their favorite companies and the way they use their data. Even though companies might be reluctant towards such initiative, the recent data protection scandals might force them to adjust their view on the subject.
Sources:
General Data Protection Regulation. (2016). Official Journal of the European Union, [online] 59(1). Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L:2016:119:FULL&from=EN [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
YouTube. (2018). Yo-Da – EUR10 Demo Day. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQKy6zc1FDk&t=0s&index=19&list=PLaDjE1VTVKMRwbyOKOYBpQRBXLPmdCIZi [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
Yo-Da. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.yo-da.co/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
