The App That Lets You Spy on Yourself and Sell Your Own Data

Citizenme

Facebook and other social networking sites aren’t free. They don’t charge you money to connect with friends, upload photos, and “like” your favorite bands and businesses, but you still pay. You pay with your personal data, which these service use to target ads.

For Citizenme, the price you pay is much higher, and it’s trying to shift internet economics back in your direction. The long-term plan is to provide a way for you to sell your own online data directly to advertisers and others of your choosing. But it isn’t there just yet. In the meantime, it’s focused on helping you collect and analyze your social media data through a mobile app that connects to multiple social networks—giving you more insight into how things work today. “The very first step is raising awareness, helping people understand what’s being done with their data,” says Citizenme founder StJohn Deakins.

Deakins, who has experience building mobile technologies for emerging markets, got the idea for Citizenme a few years ago, after selling mobile video company Triple Media to the private equity firm NewNet in 2010. “The biggest issue I could see for the internet is our data and what happens to our data,” he says. He acknowledges that personal data is essential to the health of the net because it drives the advertising that funds things. But today’s invasive data collection policies have made people distrustful. Citizenme hopes to change that by making users more aware of this process and, ultimately, letting them decide how their data is used.

How It Works

You start by connecting your social profiles to the app, which stores your data locally on your phone. Nothing is stored on Citizenme’s servers. So far, the app handles Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but other services, such as Pinterest, are planned for the future.

Citizenme

From there, you can see what data you share publicly on those networks, and get a better sense of the overall privacy settings and policies of those services. The app includes a guide to each network’s terms of service. Particularly alarming policies—such as Facebook’s broad license to your photos and other content—are highlighted in red to get your attention. And when a company updates its terms of service, Citizenme alerts you and lets you vote on whether you think it’s a good or bad change. “It’s like an anti-virus for terms of service,” Deakins says, even though the outcome of such a vote is purely symbolic.

The company also worked with Cambridge University to create a series of personality tests that can be run against your data, letting you see how different networks might perceive you. For example, the app can predict whether you’re politically liberal or conservative, and tell you whether you are more conservative on LinkedIn than you are on Twitter. It’s fun, if not particularly useful, and it might help explain some of the ads Facebook sends your way.

What the Future Holds

So far, the app is only available for iOS, but an Android version is planned for next month. Eventually, Deakins says, the team wants to offer the app for all operating systems and—with your permission—integrate far more information, including location data, statistics from health trackers, or your even genome, via services like 23andMe. That would let you learn far more about your online self and how advertisers perceive you, while providing still more data you eventually could sell.

In order to build more trust, Deakins says the company will open source the client-side of the app “bit by bit,” and it may release some server-side code as well. To keep itself accountable to users, the company also plans to establish an independent non-profit organization that will approve changes to Citizenme’s terms of service. Users will be able to vote on such changes.

The company plans to make money by taking a cut from any dollars that users earn by selling their data. If you choose not to sell your data, you’ll have the option of paying a subscription fee. “The idea is that you sell your data for a fair price,” Deakins says. “If you’re selling your data so other people can get free access to the service, then you’re not getting fair value. So some users need to pay. That’s the fairest way that we can think of.”

The Big Question

The big question is whether anyone will want to sell their data, but Deakins is confident they will. He says that so far users fall into two main groups. The first is older users who want greater control of their privacy and happily pay a subscription fee to have it. The second is younger users who, long since used to companies like Facebook profiting from their data, want to profit from it as well. He notes that selling the data could have other benefits as well.

“If I’m going to buy a new car in two weeks time, I want to share that, because I want advertising and discounts for my new car,” he says. “For me, there’s a big benefit because I get a discount on my new car. The advertiser wins because they get a verified, validated lead. For the publisher, the advertising is validated through the individual. Pretty much everyone wins in the ecosystem.”

Citizenme isn’t the first to try something like this. The defunct non-profit organization Attention Trust tried giving users tools to collect and sell their data as far back as 2005. But Deakins thinks the time is finally right, given the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. “We have an internet ecosystem where all of our data is incredible valuable,” he says. “That means that market forces say that all our data needs to get sucked up into the cloud. But the natural next progression is giving people power over their own data.”