The Data Union joins Data Collaboration Alliance partner program

The Data Collaboration Alliance is excited to welcome new partner The Data Union, a US-based nonprofit working to help individuals control and monetize their personal data.

The goal of The Data Union is to negotiate with data brokers and Big Tech to ensure that individuals receive fair compensation for the use of their personal data and that their personal data is not used without their knowledge and consent.

"Whether you are working at your desk on your day job, or spending time watching an advertisement from a company’s product you are performing labor. For example, watching an advertisement requires you to focus on a product with the purpose of being persuaded to purchase the product and service being offered. This is labor." - the Data Union website

Individuals can join The Data Union as a member to gain the benefits of having an organization work on their behalf to create a digital marketplace where all stakeholders are fairly compensated.

The Data Union is also working with partners to create a decentralized, autonomous, self-governing platform that would be owned by its stakeholders enabling consumers to take full control over the management of their personal data and to be rewarded for sharing it.

Visit: thedataunion.org

About the Data Collaboration Alliance

The Data Collaboration Alliance is a nonprofit dedicated to helping the World's people, teams, and organizations get full control of their information. We see the elimination of copies as the key to supporting control, meaningful data ownership, and the transformative power of global Collaborative Intelligence.

To learn more about free partnerships, visit: datacollaboration.org/partnership

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The Data Union: interview transcript

Cody Hill: My name is Cody Hill. I am the executive director at the daily. A little bit of background on myself. I had been previously working in big tech. I was working at Facebook for about three years in product and learned a lot. There was a really interesting time, but ultimately I ended up quitting and moving back to the east coast where I live in Raleigh.

And I, I became really interested in kind of a data reform and trying to understand ways that we can insert humans into the value that's being created by all of their data and the organization. What we do is we are focused on trying to bring together all of the different people that are in the space of.

Whether you call it data reform kind of, understanding ways that the current landscape can be changed to benefit people as opposed to corporations.

So we are building a coalition of people. We're trying to get everyone on the same page, understand what's currently going on. What, what is being done to build a future that. And, and then, you know, with the long-term hole of pushing forward legislation through kind of a union type model to influence lawmakers to pass bills, that that would be more beneficial because right now we're in this weird state where it is a bit nebulous where people are kind of like, yeah, everyone is for data reform in principle, but most people don't kind of really understand what that means or understand, like what could possibly be done.

And so trying to build a message that a lot of people can understand. This is kind of our core mission right now,

having worked at Facebook and just seeing, having been inside one of these huge tech companies where the amount of data that they have. It and like the way that a super sophisticated company like them is even kind of unable to handle the amount of data that they have. And then outside of that, on top of that, you think of all the third party companies that are buying and selling and reselling, and just the amount of copies of your data everywhere is a huge problem.

And that right there will prevent a lot of real changes from. So I thought that, that the message of the, of the DCA of like, Hey, one kind of unified access to your set of data is, is a really good concept that we would love to promote as well. And the fact that you're actually building technology to get that done.

I think that that is great because we want to partner. People who are building things. We're not necessarily, we're not building technology, we're building a network and an ecosystem of people and messages. But we want to build, we want to partner with technologists that are actually doing the hard work of, of building platforms and new technologies.

Cause that, that is like key to all of this