Tech Roundup: Using data as currency

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you the biggest stories in technology and innovation in Brazil and Latin America. This week: The startup that sees data as currency and chose Brazil to start changing people’s minds.

DrumWave wants users to own their data

Founded seven years ago in Palo Alto, California, DrumWave began life as a data scoring and certification service for companies — it was paid to analyze, price, and certify the origin and nature of the data its clients collected from their customers. 

After about 120 such projects, however, Brazilian founder André Vellozo realized how difficult this was to do, precisely because there were no standard metrics to define the value of information. Instead of trying to build this using money as a proxy, DrumWave decided to consider data as its own currency.

State of play. The core idea behind DrumWave’s business is to defend users’ data ownership in every way, including their right to sell it to whomever they choose.

Why it matters. This logic completely changes the ongoing conversation about data privacy. 

In his words. “It is much easier to define privacy in terms of ownership. If we treat data like currency, it becomes even easier to understand. From this perspective, we will give data the same characteristics as currency, such as transportability, divisibility, convertibility, and resistance to fraud [trust],” Mr. Velloso...