Google claims to have about 5000 data points about you – the consumer. Where you are, what you want, what you search at what point in time, with whom you are, etc… They track and collect this data legally and with proper disclaimers so that consumer privacy is respected. In a pitch to the FIs during Money2020, Google made these claims that they can interpret and help the merchants target their right prospects and keep loyal consumers with them.  It can advise the FIs about their customers..

In a recently publicized article, a retailer could intelligently deduce that there was a pregnancy in the house much before the rest of the family knew. The retailer did not encroach into any consumer privacy issues, but because of sophisticated business intelligence tools and data analysis experts, it was able to extrapolate and predict a certain behavior of the consumer.

Everybody wins, right? Merchant can run better campaigns at the right people, banks can offer personalized products to its customers, consumer gets better and/or free access to high tech software and tools..

Wrong! The consumer, indeed, is paying as he/she is the only one player in the whole commerce ecosystem that funds. Everyone else will feed off these funds and provide their services/products.

The merchant ends up spending a decent chunk of money in advertising, marketing and targeting that could have been avoided. Of course, the merchant marks up the price so that he can recover the cost of these activities. Google, Apple, Groupon and other couponing/deals managing companies, marketing and advertising companies  are the winners. These companies have sufficient data and intelligence about you that they can leverage.

What if you can leverage your own data? your own information?your own intentions? so that you could negotiate with the merchant. The merchant can pay YOU instead of paying Google or Apple or any other coupon/deal management company. You give your information to the merchant and get paid (as a discount, points, etc) for doing so.

How do you do this? Well, thanks to the advances in the cloud, mobile and API technologies that such a model can be built. As with any other consumer product, this requires huge scale and acceptance for it to work, but this is what we at Niksepa are attempting to build.

At a very high level, a private silo of information is built for you in the cloud. A silo containing a rich data where ONLY YOU have complete access . Not Google, not Facebook, not Target, not Amazon nor Groupon and not even Niksepa. Niksepa will just facilitate you to build up the silo and constantly populate with relevant data. Niksepa will also facilitate you to “auction” a relevant “bit” your data to relevant companies for an incentive.

Won’t the merchant be happy to credit you for expressing your interest to buy? Won’t you be happy to keep your data with you and leverage it to the fullest instead of Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook leveraging it?

More details in the next few weeks/months, but Mr. Consumer – remember: Your data isn’t anybody else’s business!