The Future of Consumer Data in an Open Data Economy, #ODE

Consumer Data privacy has been a major concern, haunting individuals, enterprises, and government. The Internet was designed to comfortably provide connectivity to individuals. But with the rapid expansion of Internet users, the demand to protect them has become an absolute necessity.

Consumers face a multitude of privacy concerns and, despite being the true owners of the data, are unable to control the consumption of their data by outside organizations. The exposure of data misuse by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign has created a sense of urgency to begin to enact data privacy guidelines.

In the case of the United States, legal precedents have just begun to emerge. California is the first state to enact privacy protection and began enforcing the regulations starting July 1st, 2020. While Europe has enacted GDPR to protect individuals, the United States (as well as many developing nations) is far from applying the rigorous level of protection of GDPR.

Enterprises face mounting regulatory and compliance challenges as most of the growing companies are still incapable of storing their user data securely in stagnant data-repositories, presenting significant exposure risk for data compromise. After a data breach, users feel cheated, as an apology and an assurance that it won’t happen again are hollow victories. Compromised data, fines, and corporate apologies have become a new norm.

Governments are being pressured to mandate policies that both promote ethical data responsibility and fostering an environment conducive to commerce.

Addressing these concerns, SASHI EDUPUGANTI, who has held senior positions at a bevy of high-profile companies, including HBO, Bridgewater Associates LP, Coegil Holdings, Comcast, and General Electric Company, offers a solution with his pioneering start-up: ODE Holdings, Inc. ODE, an acronym for Open Data Economy, was born from Edupuganti’s parental desire to protect his children from data breaches and privacy violations when they navigate social media. That fueled his decision to take action to transform the way privacy is handled.

ODE offers a unique service that solves the data privacy issue for individuals, companies, and government through a familiar and trusted data ecosystem. It aims to provide a platform catering to both individuals and enterprises that organically follows rules framed by the government.

For a long time now, user data has been kept knowingly or unknowingly by companies that monetize users’ data for their benefit. The sole owners of data are fed with ads according to information they have shared: sometimes their privacy is compromised and, in worst-case scenarios, data is misused or identity is stolen. Often, data brokers and intermediaries use aggressive exfiltration methods, such as web scraping and cookies, to collect, use, share, and monetize personal information. The existing system has created an imbalance in the data economy. There is an emerging opportunity to ameliorate the status quo and create a new way of managing consumer data privacy while continuing to meet the needs of enterprises.

The ODE solution bridges this disparity within the existing system, which gathers and monetizes data from the hundreds of millions of consumers who interact with the Internet daily, and the consumers who are the rightful owners of the data - yet receive no compensation. It aims to create a “micro economy” by giving back a royalty to the users, each time their personal data is being used by the organizations.

Enterprise SME’s are faced with an ever-changing data landscape. Most organizations are combating with ever-growing data, which creates operational, legal, and compliance challenges. Despite best efforts, 85% of enterprises fail to fully exploit data in meaningful ways, and the cost of data breaches from 2017 to 2018 rose from $45.5M to $320.7M. All indicators point to ever-increasing costs of data breaches, creating operational and compliance risks.

The success of any individual or organization is not only about what they do, but more importantly about what they don’t do. ODE’s solution identifies and eliminates the things they don’t need to do, while allowing them to remain agile and propel their business forward. It is a cultural shift centered on lean, privacy, and consent. By eliminating the local storage requirement for the data and getting access to the synthesis based on consent and context, the ODE process enables enterprises to plan for and utilize only the data they need to run their business.

ODE provides data privacy solutions, smart analytics, real-time consumer 360-access, and gives governance organizations the ability to enforce data privacy regulations for enterprises to comply organically. This allows organizations to reduce the risk of exposure due to internally storing data.

With risk exposure minimized, SME’s can shift their focus and resources used in the collection and management of data to other important aspects. ODE will offer a partner certification program that allows the “application owners” to become a part of the ODE data privacy solution and lets the data management be immutable and decentralized.

ODE is a decentralized data store, distributed ledger blockchain technology, in its purest form held at the source, accessed and shared only at a synthesis level based on “consent” and “agreed incentives,” whether they happen to be a rewards program or exchange in value. Due to the inherent privacy by design architecture, sharing, requesting, and storage of the information (held in an immutable nature) provides transparency and integrity to the data lineage.

ODE offers a solution that could lead to the ethical collection, usage, and shared monetization of consumer data that could become the Industry standards for a new and open data economy. Aiming to solve one of the most challenging problems, the best is yet to come for ODE Holdings, with planned expansion worldwide. ODE recently acquired DataCoup assets, a pioneer in the personal data marketplace.

For enterprises that are looking to (re)build trust with consumers, for whom digital privacy is a priority and future data science capabilities a must, ODE is the need of the hour. Consumers who are concerned about their data privacy should demand that their digital providers adopt ODE for a secure future. Let’s build an ecosystem that shows it truly cares by taking care of our personal data.