Hate How Companies Use Your Data? This App Gives Users Back Their Control. TIKI puts data privacy decisions in the user's hands, and now they're looking for investors.
By Entrepreneur Store Edited by Jason Fell
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You may not realize it but your data is being bought and sold every day. Companies want to know everything about you so they can more effectively target you with ads and other offers appealing straight to your specific wants and needs. So everyone from big retailers and social media platforms to service providers are farming your data with relish every single day.
Meanwhile, as you and all your information are commoditized, data breaches put all your personal details at risk just as regularly. There were almost 1,800 publicly reported breaches between January and June of 2021, exposing over 18.8 billion records.
Against that backdrop, it's no wonder that more than 80 percent of people feel helpless to protect their information online. And a similar number feel the potential risk of their data being stolen and misused outweigh any possible benefits.
Despite all that fear and all that money, TIKI is a company that thinks it has a solution, one that puts personal data back in the hands of each individual. Now, TIKI's bold vision for the future, where you own your own information, is launching — and the company is looking for some tech-savvy investors with an eye for the value of personal data to back its vision and potentially get rich in the process.
TIKI lets users decide the fate of their data.
TIKI wants to flip the script, a company founded on the idea that each person should decide what happens to their data. With the TIKI app, the user-friendly process of controlling who farms your data is as simple as using a dating app like Tinder.
When users go to a website or log into an account, TIKI assesses exactly what information an organization is trying to gather on each user, then lets the user decide whether that outlet can have the data or not with an easy swipe left or swipe right.
If you don't want Facebook to use their facial recognition software to track your face across images on their platform, swipe left to say no. If you don't mind, swipe right and allow it. Data is fully encrypted and anonymized with TIKI, only living on your personal devices and only released when you give the approval.
Of course, under this model, most users would always be swiping left all the time. Who wants any of their personal data out there, right? However, we each might feel a little differently about the farming of our information if we were being cut in for a portion of the profits from its sale. TIKI deals each user in for a piece of their own action.
When a user approves their data for sale to the companies they choose, TIKI calculates its worth, facilitates that sale, and sends the proceeds to each user's account, which can then be withdrawn from the app as cash or crypto. Users can even use their data to better the world by donating the money to their favorite cause.
Become a ground floor TIKI investor.
While TIKI is 100 percent free to customers, TIKI earns a 10 percent transaction fee charged to businesses through the sale of the authorized data. That means if 100,000 users earn $120 a year from the sale of their information, TIKI pulls down a tidy $1.2 million from those companies.
After debuting earlier this year, TIKI has already amassed more than 120,000 users, with a goal of more than 1 million users by summer 2022.
Through the company's StartEngine campaign, TIKI is seeking funding to expand its reach, offering equity in the platform for investments as small as $250. So far, the crowdfunding has raised more than $275,000, with investors like Jim O'Neill (former CIO & Chief People Officer at Hubspot and SAASWorks founder) praising TIKI as "the first mover in the battle for getting our personal data back in our own control."
Right now, other potential investors can check out TIKI's StartEngine page, find out more about the app, their business model, and financial projections, then decide whether to get in on the ground floor of this groundbreaking new data privacy solution.
Prices subject to change
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