Owning Your Browsing Data

Hi all,

Founder of TheGoodData here. TGD is the first data coop ever (I hope it will not be the last one!). It is a coop because users own 100% of the company. We consider that it is not fair that some companies are being built and sold at great valuations without users getting a cut of of them. If WhatsApp was sold at $22bn it was not only because each of it's 32 engineers built an incredible product, but also because the company had +450 million users.

And what does a data co-op mean? Well, data is a source of wealth in the same way than earth, labour or capital. It requires harvesting, securing, processing and eventually trading. This is nowadays done by big companies with or mostly without our permission. But that data is ours. It emanates from us. If we collaborate, we can build an entity that takes care of all that process. That is what TGD aims to do.

The very first step that we are taking tomorrow November 27th is focused on desktop browsing data, and for that we have built a Chrome extension that blocks third parties tracking you online and -if you give an additional permission- trade a small part of that data anonymously. All money earned is reinvested in TheGoodData and in charities

Code is open and we will open data as well in the future, so anyone can collaborate and build new features. By the way, we will reward those collaborations with a share of one sixth of revenues for the next six years after the feature has been deployed.

I hope it clarifies a bit what we want to do. If you want to help us, drop me an email at marcos at thegooddata dot org

Best