Killi Launches Unveil, a One-stop Shop for Consumers to View and Edit Their Data
Killi, the consent-first consumer data marketplace, launched Unveil, a product iteration that will allow consumers to view and edit the data companies have collected about them.
A data privacy movement is underway. States are passing laws to give consumers more control of their data, and tech behemoths such as Apple and Google are cutting off access to third-party data and mobile location tracking. But for consumers concerned about privacy, the number of companies collecting their data can be overwhelming, and each new solution seems insufficient to take control of the massive amount of personal data companies have collected about them.
This overwhelming sense that there’s nothing effective the consumer can do about their data privacy is what Unveil tries to solve. It also speaks to Killi’s broader mission.
“One of the reasons there’s no action [on consumer data privacy] is because there’s no destination” for consumers to take action, said Killi founder and CEO Neil Sweeney. “If we accept that everybody has a profile today and the gap in the market is they don’t have access to it, why don’t we create access to it?”
What Unveil Offers Consumers
The first benefit Unveil provides is transparency. Killi estimates that each American consumer’s data generates $6,000 in annual revenue. (The company bases this on the annual revenue per user claims of companies such as Snapchat and Facebook.)
That’s a lot of data worth a great deal of money, and there’s no currently no one place for consumers to view it. Unveil tackles that problem.
In addition to being able to view their data using Unveil, users will be able to edit it. This benefits both companies and consumers.
It allows consumers to correct the record and possibly get rewards for their information — if they opt into data sales via Killi’s consent-first marketplace. It allows companies to purchase data that is not only time-stamped and consumer-approved but also verified. That should help businesses address three pervasive challenges in digital marketing: fraud, poor data quality, and data leveraged without consumer awareness and consent.
Killi’s Long-term Privacy Vision
Of course, at present, Killi cannot ensure its users that companies will not collect their data from other non-consensual sources or marketplaces. However, the company’s long-term ambition is to create a consensual data marketplace that will obviate those non-consensual sources, transforming the landscape of data privacy and that of digital marketing.
Sweeney posits that, confronted with the choice between purchasing data from another marketplace or Killi’s, brands are going to take the data consumers have consented to share with them — especially with privacy standards rising and being codified into law.
“Let’s take the data that’s readily available, put it in the market, and provide the one thing that nobody else has: one-by-one, time-stamped consumer consent. And when you take the two files of the same person, match them up against each other. This one does not involve [the consumer]; this one does. I like to believe that the Fortune 500 are going to buy the one that has the consumer involved,” Sweeney said.
If successful, the Killi marketplace would be more than just a privacy play; it would be the foundation of a new status quo, and a new commercial ecosystem, for the data that drives digital marketing.