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“The data market is there. The thing is, the owners of the data are not participants in the market, fundamentally,” Telefonica researcher Nuria Oliver told Motherboard in an interview. “What my research projects are developing into is how to make us part of the market that already exists, because people are selling my data and making money off it.”Telefonica’s latest study at MTL tested a personal data market’s viability. To do this, the research team outfitted 60 participants with smartphones running OpenPDS, a data privacy tool that keeps raw data from being picked up by data miners, and FUNF, a piece of data analysis software that makes sense of it through visualizations. The participants’ data was separated into categories like “location,” “app usage,” and “media,” and at the end of each day they were asked to auction it off.Given the option to control and know the value of our data, a lot of people will probably be willing to part with it for monetary compensation.
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