Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swartzropper. On today's show, who owns your data?

Most Americans and people around the world who use the internet regularly are probably familiar at this point with the internet business model, where you get a service like Facebook or Google for free, but it's not really free because you are letting the company collect data

about yourself and then you get ads targeted to you. That's kind of how it works. But are there other

models and is there a way that you could actually make direct money getting cash for your data?

My next guest says so. Joining me to discuss this is Matt Hogan, CEO of Data Koo. Matt, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

So, Matt, tell us about the business model of your company before we jump into policy.

Yeah, absolutely. So the basic premise is all of us as individuals and consumers create a lot of data every day in the course of our normal daily actions. We create data on our phones,

on our devices, on our laptops. We create data when we shop on our debit and credit card accounts.

We create data on our social platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.

We create data on our browser with our daily browsing activities. Of course, that's a pretty

hot button issue in terms of cookies and do not track, et cetera. And in large part, we don't, as consumers who

are creators of this asset and make no mistake data as an asset, in large part as consumers,

we don't really partake in the economic value chain of this data in any sort of tangible,

overt, direct, meaningful way. As you mentioned

in the introduction to the podcast, there is some value, right? So I get on Facebook and they're

providing me with this platform where I can see pictures and talk to my friends and do all sorts

of stuff. And they get my data and a billion and a half other people's data and build a

$500 billion company.

So that's fine and we kind of tacitly make that exchange.

But what we're trying to do is bring that data exchange above board, put it on the table,

arm the consumer with their data and allow them to transact with it as they see fit.

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