Today, advertising and data mining are everywhere. Your favorite online services may be free, but online shopping and social media browsing come with costs. Your data is being collected and analyzed for the financial gain of these “free” online services, and your behavior is being manipulated. Consider your data as a currency for a moment; then, you can see its value to companies. The more data companies harvest, the more accurately your habits can be tracked and targeted. However, there is now a way to maintain your data privacy while also benefiting from it.
What is Data Privacy?
Privacy is about respecting your rights. If a person has a reasonable desire to keep something private, ignoring that person’s wishes is disrespectful. Data privacy determines how a piece of information or data about you should be handled based on its relative importance. For example, you probably wouldn’t mind sharing your name with a stranger when introducing yourself. Still, there is other personal information you wouldn’t share, at least not until you become more acquainted with that person. When you register for a new social media account, you share a tremendous amount of personal information (email address, date of birth, phone number, etc.) beyond your name.
If you use a website, app, or service, they would know about you and sometimes store your information. It may seem practical for the website to share some of your information with third-party services that help complete a transaction. But when your behavior on a website is monitored and used in ways that you don’t expect or distributed to third parties without your permission, that violates your data privacy and data rights.
Why does Data Privacy Matter?
Privacy limits the power of both the government and private sector companies. The more someone knows about you, the more control they have over you. The attributes of freedom include autonomy and control over one’s life. You can’t have that if so many critical decisions are made secretly without your awareness.
Assume your data is transferred from hospitals to insurance companies. They can use it to make decisions, from inventing new drugs to pricing insurance rates to developing highly targeted advertising. For example, healthcare data typically contains sensitive information about patients, including their health condition histories, home addresses, and Social Security numbers.
Personal data is used to make crucial decisions in your life. It can influence your choices and shape your behavior, and, in the wrong hands, cause you colossal harm.
Here are reasons why data privacy matters:
- Your sensitive personal data, including political opinions, health-related data, and biometric data, can cause significant harm if compromised and lead to a breach of your confidentiality.
- Processing (storing, altering, disclosing, etc.) your personal data to any services without your permission is wrong.
- Your stolen financial information, such as the mishandling of credit card details, can negatively impact your credit score.
- Public disclosure of your identity and private facts without your permission affects your reputation and violates your privacy.
- Online services track your repeated behavior, such as frequent searches for locations, hotels, and flights. They use this data to raise prices at a later date, since they know you are interested and more likely to make a purchase.
How does Rainfall maintain your Data Privacy along with Benefits?
Rainfall is on a mission to protect your data privacy and provide you with a way to earn extra income. Sharing data with Rainfall is entirely safe and secure. Our top priority is to protect your privacy and enable you to earn value from the data you choose to share.
Here is how Rainfall empowers you to maintain your data privacy:
- Rainfall will never collect, copy, or store any of your information.
- You have complete control over the data you share.
- Rainfall does not process your personal data, such as personally identifiable information (PII).
- Your data is processed and contextualized only on your phone.
- You always have the power to decide what data you want to share.
- Rainfall doesn't have a complicated and unclear privacy policy.
Rainfall is a decentralized privacy-preserving data intelligence platform that unlocks the financial value in the digital life of every connected human. When you provide Rainfall access to your data, we use advanced edge-based AI algorithms that aggregate, contextualize, and generate Real-time Social Insights. The revenue generated from these insights is automatically distributed back to you in the form of Raindrops within the Rainfall app.
With Rainfall, you always have the power to decide what data you want to share and whether you want to get paid for your data or not. In short, you always have complete control of your data.
