I have some questions :) I think the idea of owning your data is good. But I wonder if we could monetize it, as most of our personal data isn't too valuable. For example, per this Ben Evans post (https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2022/5/27/theres-no-such-thing-as-data), "in Q1 2022 Meta made just 99 cents of free cashflow per daily active user per month." So, if Facebook paid me $1/month for using my data, it wouldn't move the needle, let alone get me anywhere close to UBI. I don't know anything about medical data, and I assume it's more valuable than the data about memes I liked. So, I'm wondering how it would work in practice. For example, how much is the medical data of an average American worth? Would you somehow batch data of multiple people so that you can, e.g., sell "Data of 40-year-old Americans from Midwest who had some heart problems" to generate more revenue?
Thanks for your question - I'll try my best to address most of them here! At a high level, we extract the most value from data by actually letting the patient own it - since the highest value "product" is actually patient engagement! We also plan to deliver value by giving our users access to leading healthcare AI that can predict disease and save lives! There's a few things about health data that we think makes it unique. The first is when we look at the customer lifetime value of certain chronic branded medications. In the US drugs for leading brands can yield a lifetime value of $50K USD+, rare diseases can easily get into $2-3M USD. As a result, the customer acquisition cost and budget for pharma is a lot higher, in theory, pharma would pay $100s and even $1000s for a converting patient. Our platform can serve privacy preserving ads to highly qualified leads and monetize this. Another area for monetization is around clinical trial recruitment - which pharma will pay $500-$2k per participant (since its a rate limiting step for getting a drug to market, and many of these trials are becoming decentralized - ie. you do it at home or a local clinic, increasing convenience). The other way we mitigate this low value problem is through our tokenomics. We plan to put 5% of our revenues into a fund, and our tokens would represent ownership of this fund - effectively creating a perpetuity / royalty instrument. You're right that it may not be quite a UBI - but we see it as a step and we do think it can be valuable. This article has more of the dollar amounts (data being worth $250-$6500 to a single buyer depending on how holistic it is) - https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/04/19/the-digital-currency-youll-use-to-buy-your-next-car-your-health-data/?sh=320889e25c79 So the answer to solving this issue of low value is making sure our active users get direct payments during ad and research deals on top of ownership of a royalty-like instrument. Additionally, we want to develop and deploy healthcare AI so our users can detect diseases early and get care they need. So the value we bring over time isn't purely monetary, but will also include healthcare services!
Hey, thanks for this in-depth answer! I'd happily use privacy-centric AI (e.g., running on my computer) trained on my medical data to get personalized insights. These dollar values make me wonder what the limitations are when we want to extrapolate results from medical data. So let's say you gather data in low-income countries where the monetary incentive is more attractive - can you also draw conclusions about high-income countries? Or do things like quality of life (food, air, water, etc.) in low-income countries limit the ability to draw broad conclusions?
On the other hand, there are probably many low- and mid-income countries where the quality of life is pretty comparable to that of rich countries. E.g., Poland 15 years ago was much poorer than it is today, but air quality, food, water, etc., metrics haven't changed that much.
The problem we are running into is data capture quality and validation (why we're unfortunately bound to the US for now). Countries like Poland and Germany are unique in that they have recently made strides in electronic health data capture and sharing - but as you can imagine standardization becomes key for deploying AI. Many of these innovations require regulatory partnership to ensure data is properly recorded and able to be shared by individuals. In Poland (and in the EU), there's a company called Data Lake that is doing this https://data-lake.co/data-lake-ecosystem/