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The data economy is broken. This might come as no surprise to you. Or you might be asking, what\u2019s a data economy?\xa0

Any economy is based on the trading of some sort of commodity. That might be stocks, gold, or baskets of fish, or even all of the above. Therefore, the data economy is simply the trading of data.\xa0

The health of the data economy is especially important in the modern world because it underlies so much of the wider economy. There are few businesses that aren\u2019t dependent on some sort of data, using it to determine and refine basic business practices, customer interactions and hiring standards. Of course don\u2019t forget the how much nearly every company relies on data for product development, production, and distribution. However, that isn\u2019t the part of the data economy that is most broken. The part that we are really concerned with is the part of the data economy that has directly to do with your data.\xa0

Your data is everywhere on the internet, collected by any number of \u2018free\u2019 applications and web-based services and then sold to other companies without your knowledge and consent. The fact that Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest all advertise themselves as \u2018free\u2019 is exactly how they hook you. They get you to try it out, connect with a few people, or use their search engines or marketplaces and before long most people see it as just another tool they have integrated into their daily lives.\xa0

Facebook has been making extensive use of these black box techniques in the third world for a while now. They offer free phones and service to people in Africa or the Philippines, the only catch is that the phones are locked into the Facebook ecosystem, giving the company an unprecedented amount of access into the lives of people there, which also grants them a scary level of influence over the future of those places.\xa0

Why is it scary? In addition to that it\u2019s just a little scary thinking about how much these corporations know about you, they use it to control not just the advertisements you see but the information that you see. Depending on how they are set up, these companies will either keep you into your own information bubble, only feeding you things similar to what you have seen before, or they will censor information that they decide they don\u2019t want you to know. Regardless of their motivations, that is incredibly troubling.

Just as worrying is the double dipping that a number of companies take part in. One example that comes to mind is 23 and Me. This is one of those companies that will tell you your ancestry based on analyzing your DNA (usually from a vial of spit). How is this bad? Well, that was all they did \u2013 nothing. You pay them money, they tell you information you want to know. That\u2019s a perfectly good and reasonable transaction. However, they don\u2019t stop there. They take your genetic data and sell it to other companies without you knowing anything about it.\xa0

That information can potentially come back on you in negative ways. Imagine an insurance company gains access to your information and determines that you have a genetic predisposition to lung cancer. Now, you\u2019re smart, you don\u2019t smoke cigarettes but you have a cigar with friends a couple times a year, information the insurance company got by buying data from your credit card company. Suddenly, your rates go up unexpectedly.\xa0

These kinds of issues reveal the fundamental problems at the foundation of the way our digital civilization is working. As public awareness of these problem continues to grow, there will be a backlash. There is already active talk of adding in significant regulation at the federal level from both sides of the aisle. The public is also slowly looking for alternatives to these services that have been taking advantage of our ignorance. Eventually, that will starve the social media companies and the companies that rely on them of data, leading to an economic restructuring that could potentially be painful.

TARTLE is trying to address this issue by setting up a data marketplace in which the individual is once more in charge of their data, choosing when and with whom to share it. It is just one small part in a movement that is working to remind major organizations that the people they rely on for success are not just points of data, but actual human beings.\xa0

What\u2019s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe. The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby. What's your data worth? www.tartle.co