Personal data has become a hot topic recently with the new GDPR regulations from the EU and the Facebook scandal involving Cambridge Analytica.

Personal data is very much the “oil” of the 21st Century, worth an estimated $250 billion per year.

At the moment though, the industry is tainted by secrecy, with a great deal of personal data effectively stolen by brokers and “middlemen” who then package it up and sell it on to big corporations for profit.

With the GDPR regulations, this will become increasingly difficult for them to do and will in many cases be outright illegal.

So stepping into the breach is Opiria, a company that is having its ICO at the moment.

Opiria will enable the trading of personal data securely and legally over the blockchain. People will be able to sell their data to companies anonymously and securely on Opiria’s platform, so they will benefit directly from their own data, where as at the moment in the vast majority of cases they don’t.

In this way Opiria could provide a passive income for people who choose to provide their data to organisations on the platform, in a way that is transparent, open and legal.

Below let’s take a look at how this will work and how you can earn a passive income with Opiria.

The Opiria Platform — How it Will Work

OK, so let’s say you wanted to earn some income from Opiria in exchange for your data. How would it work?

Well, here are the key steps you would go through:

• First, you would download their app to your smartphone.
• Then you would create a profile with information such as your gender, age and country.
• You will receives an initial reward from the platform (in PDATA
  tokens — the native tokens on the Opiria platform) just for installing the Opiria app as well as for signing up and disclosing personal data.
• Companies can then access users and ask them to complete either a mobile survey or a mobile diary (more on that below).
• You would receive a notification from a company with an offer to complete a survey (or diary).
• An offer would for example ask you to submit certain data and offer you a certain number of PDATA tokens for it. You can then choose to accept or reject the offer.
• If you accept the offer, the platform will initiate a smart contract on the blockchain for the agreed number of tokens to be transferred to you upon provision of the specified data.
• Then once you have enough tokens in your account, you can cash them out for fiat currency based on the current market price.
• Opiria will aggregate all the responses received for the survey in question automatically and present them visually in table and chart form to the company or organisation concerned.

So as you can see, it is a completely automated process all executed transparently and efficiently on the blockchain. There is no need for a middleman and rather than having to wait 6 weeks for results, companies can get them 50–100 faster at just 5% of the cost of normal market research.

You will be able to choose exactly what data you wish to disclose and to whom, which is a big improvement over the current situation where dodgy data brokers like Cambridge Analytica gather data on people and then sell it onto whomever they please. And it will be anonymous so you won’t need to disclose personal information that you may wish to keep private.

In terms of receiving income, it will all be seamless and straightforward on the blockchain so no need to wait for payments or be unsure how much you will receive for providing data.

What Kind of Data Can You Disclose?

As mentioned above, there will be two main types of data on the Opiria platform. One will be mobile surveys and the other will be mobile diaries. Here is how both will work:

• The Mobile Survey: this would tend to be more of a typical survey like the ones undertaken for market research today, where you would answer a question or set of questions. For example, it could be which particular iPhone design you prefer from a choice of three.
• The Mobile Diary: you would provide feedback on a product or a service and what your experience of it has been over a given period of time. This feedback could include text, pictures, audio and videos.
  Opiria are also aiming to add the option of objective consumer behavior data to the platform by September 2018. This would include adding eye tracking and emotion analysis.

The eye tracking option would follow your gaze behaviour when looking at stimuli (e.g. videos or pictures) within a survey or when browsing the internet, playing games or interacting with software. The facial expression option will analyse how consumers interact with a website or view an advertisement and how that influences their emotions.

Whilst this would present excellent and insightful data for companies, it may be more information than some people would want to provide. Of course, with the Opiria platform it is completely up to you what data you provide so if you would prefer not to provide eye tracking and emotion analysis data then that is your choice.

Conclusion — A Brave New World for Data Ownership

The idea behind Opiria is a timely one given all the concerns the public have expressed recently following the Facebook — Cambridge Analytica scandal.

People rightly feel they should control their own data and unwanted parties should not be allowed to access it and profit from it. The recent introduction of the GDPR rules in the EU has reinforced this notion.

Opiria will address these concerns with a platform that will allow people to sell their data to companies and organisations in exchange for PData tokens in a safe, transparent way. People will have full control of their data and what they release to whom and when.

So this could be a nice way to earn an extra bit of income. Of course the $64,000 question will be how much income you could earn, but if there is a big take-up of the Opiria platform, then with a fixed token supply and people holding on to some of their tokens, the value could increase significantly over time.

Obviously there are no guarantees that will happen, but there is the possibility that rewards on the Opiria platform will be more than for completing traditional surveys.

Either way it looks like a really interesting project and let’s hope it ushers in a new era of data rights for the public and we see the end of companies like Cambridge Analytica.

You can check out the Opiria ICO here, follow them on Telegram here and receive updates from them on Bitcointalk here.