Killi Ltd (CVE:MYID) (OTCQB:MYIDF), a startup company paying users for their data, was featured in Business Insider last month
CEO Neil Sweeney discussed what the company is calling the Killi Paycheck, a recurring way users can earn money passively every month. Killi pays users to share location, shopping, browsing and spending data. It sells that data, and splits the profits with users 50/50.
Consumer data, Sweeney told BI, is a $100 billion industry, but consumers aren’t benefiting from the sale of their data. Killi is working to change that.
READ: Killi joins Datatrade to widen access to its consumer data empowerment products
"There is universal acceptance around this idea that consumers should have some sort of transparency, knowledge, and compensation around the use of their data," Sweeney told the publication. "When you juxtapose that against the data market or the ad market or the media market, the entire industry is driven by data, but there is no consumer inclusion whatsoever."
Killi offers users the opportunity to earn money through surveys and active data sharing, but the Killi Paycheck lets users earn money without having to put in a lot of effort.
"It has to be passive, where the compensation is happening in the background and it doesn't require a lot of active participation from the consumer," Sweeney said.
Depending on how much data they share, users can earn $1, $2, or $3 each month, the company said. Surveys and other data sharing will still be available for users to earn additional money. Its data sharing modules include location, browsing data and, more recently, bank account transaction data.
"There are 350 million Americans, and every single person over the age of 16 is having their data sold at over $500 per month," Sweeney said. "We're trying to slowly but surely change that narrative to redistribute, dollar by dollar, more and more of that money back to the consumer."
Sweeney believes increasing privacy regulations could be a boon for Killi.
"When you're a consumer-facing brand, you do not want to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar selling non-compliant data," Sweeney said. "Every brand and every agency is required to buy more privacy-compliant data. That benefits us because it's a share game. That means more people should be buying our data."
Sweeney pointed to the recently passed California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which says consumers should have the option to opt out of "cross-context behavioral advertising," (read: targeted ads based on personal data gathered through websites and other sources). Killi is positioned to capitalize on developments like this, Sweeney said.
"We already have basically IP around kind of the most specific privacy regulation in the US," Sweeney said. "With a lot of publishers and brands and others who have been looking to either add additional data or reinforce consent, or are worried about deprecation of some of those identifiers, they've outsourced consent to us.”
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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