The world is rapidly becoming more interconnected, and we are generating ever-larger reams of digital data. One trend accelerating this pace of change is the growing prevalence of connected devices.

In 2014, a total of 10 billion internet-connected devices, and economists from the World Economic Forum predicted a staggering rise to 20 billion connected devices by 2020. [1] In actuality, this number surpassed, and the number of IoT devices alone hit over 22 billion by 2018. [2] More devices mean more data, and the amount of new data generated is nearly unfathomable. Every single day, we produce 2.2 quintillion bytes of data, that’s 2,200,000,000,000,000,000. [3]

This figure should be no surprise, considering we make 70,000 Instagram posts and conduct three million Google searches every minute. [4]

But for all of this data creation, how are our lives being meaningfully improved? So far, it seems they are not, and there is an ever-growing chasm between data growth and data value. The lack of improvement is because while we produce vast reams of data, we either lack access to our data at all, or where we can access it, we require the mechanisms to provide us with the right data at the right time. Since our data is often siloed and inaccessible to us, our data’s ability and value decreases. Our various data silos don’t communicate with each other. Your email doesn’t speak to your social, which doesn’t interact with your calendar.

In some ways, you might think this protects your privacy. But just because we don’t see our information pollinating, doesn’t mean it’s not happening without our knowledge, and we now know corporate giants track our every move, even when we leave their platforms. The holy grail of companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon is your information. Their platforms covertly collect, sell, and use our data against us through advertisers. They generate in-depth psychological profiles that governments leverage (like in China’s Social Credit Score) or are even obtained by hackers. Our data is often weaponized against us and used to influence our thoughts and purchasing habits.

While you may think your access to services like Instagram or YouTube is “free,” it’s only free because these companies collect massive amounts of our personal (and often sensitive) data. These companies are effectively conducting mass surveillance on you and selling your information to the highest bidder, without your informed consent. For example, did you know that Facebook not only collects data from your activities on Facebook but also tracks you across every other website you visit?

“The biggest companies in the world right now are made up of trillions of digital assets that, in my opinion, should belong to us as individuals,” said Kaiser. “Our data has been harvested, collected, modeled, and monetized — sometimes sold on as raw data, and sometimes licensed just for advertisers to target us.” — Brittany Kaiser [5]

So what’s the value of all this data anyway? Its importance to Facebook and Google has thus far been very different from its value to you, the end-user.

Data is now becoming the most valuable commodity on earth, recently surpassing fossil fuels like oil. An individual’s Facebook data may be worth over $100, and one individual recently sold his data for $2,733 on Kickstarter. [6] [7]

So how is it that these Big Tech companies all have more data about you than you ever thought possible, yet you cannot use it directly for your benefit? You generate the data, then they collect it and keep it for themselves to sell it off. Is that benefiting you? Even if it is, it’s the tip of the iceberg in what that level of data insight could do to help your own life. We could connect it all in a way that respects privacy, provides you with anonymity, and with actual security. Just imagine what we could unlock.

Enter Memri: Truly private, truly personal, truly yours.

Memri is an open-source, private, secure, and democratic personal knowledge system designed to make sense of all the data you create and put it to work for you. It means you are now the master of your data domain and can control how it’s stored and accessed. It means now your data can communicate without the prying eyes of big brother.

It means you can control exactly who sees your data and when. And it means you alone have the right to capture the value of your data, explore it, manipulate it, easily browse, and view it to make better decisions. And if you want to share your data with others, you can decide precisely what to share, and most importantly, be compensated for it.

All of this data is stored in your own ‘Memri pod’, or personal online datastore. This pod stores all your digital knowledge and interconnects it so that you can easily find it and browse through it in the way that you want. The pod will be open-source software that you can run on any computer with the highest encryption and security standards.

You can import information from your search, notes, photos, cloud storage, fitness and health, books, browsing, maps, mail, messaging, and more. You can “store” all information about you and the people and things you love so that you can easily browse, find, and use Memri to improve your day-to-day. Memri will automatically sort and intelligently process data and make it accessible using natural human language.

In short, Memri empowers users by unlocking their data’s potential and putting control of your data back in your own hands. The future of data is here. The future of data is Memri.

Interested? Here’s how to get involved as a developer; as a consumer.

SOURCES
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/04/technology-data-connected-world/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/802690/worldwide-connected-devices-by-access-technology/
[3] https://www.domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-5?aid=ogsm072517_1&sf100871281=1
[4] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/
[5] www.digitaltrends.com/computing/brittany-kaiser-cambridge-analytica-iovo/
[6] https://theconversation.com/how-much-is-your-data-worth-to-tech-companies-lawmakers-want-to-tell-you-but-its-not-that-easy-to-calculate-119716
[7] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461902402/a-bit-e-of-me