TARTLE may be based in the United States but our scope is global. Our goal is to improve data privacy and management for people everywhere. We’ve already made great progress towards that goal as our community is already worldwide. That is because we recognize the importance of the individual in data generation and sharing, and the need to keep each person’s data fully under their own control. Still, TARTLE also recognizes that our community can spread faster and our goals better be achieved if we work with businesses and governments around the world. Which is why we were recently meeting with representatives from the European Union. Right now, they are trying to find ways to improve the flow of data from the individual on up so they can use that data to help guide and implement policy and be of greater use to companies in their product creation. One of the major obstacles they have experienced is that they don’t currently have anything to help integrate all the necessary programs in order to manage and analyze that data. They also are struggling to find ways to incentivize private industry to participate in data sharing.

What many often miss is that you need an economic incentive to share data. This is as true of corporations as much as individuals. Without any kind of revenue stream that will come from sharing data, it’s actually in a company’s best interest to hoard the data and use it for their own purposes. The EU people of course recognize the need to educate people on the importance and benefits of data sharing but took some convincing on the necessity of the economic incentive. Once it was pointed out that as good as education is, without the incentive, few people will participate, and all of their lofty policy goals will only ever be words on paper. People also need to keep in mind that no one, not business, not government gets data without the interactions of individuals.

Up until now, data has been gained covertly through a variety of interactions without the individual’s knowledge. TARTLE, of course, is trying to change that, to increase individual control of data while also providing an incentive to share it. As it turns out, there is a perception amongst the governments of the EU that the incentive of monetizing data would lead to minimal adoption of TARTLE. That people would resist that idea. Fortunately, this idea was quickly debunked as TARTLE’s data shows that adoption of TARTLE is already greater in the European Union than in the United States. If anything, EU citizens find data monetization to be exactly the right incentive. That also means that we are already in a position to demonstrate how useful we can be when it comes to helping develop policy. One of the difficulties for any government, especially one that covers as much territory and different cultures as the EU, is no matter how good the data is that they are using to create policy there is always some bit of guesswork involved. There will always be holes in the data, or it can misinterpreted, or there will simply be factors that were never taken into account.

TARTLE can help mitigate this in a couple of ways. First, by going directly to the individual, individuals who are already volunteering to share their data, the initial data set can be improved. The data itself can be trusted more because given that all the participants are willing they are less likely to lie as might be the case with people who are annoyed when a pollster calls or a survey arrives in the mail. There are of course follow up and specifically directed questions that can be asked of the same participants. Even better though is the second major way that TARTLE can help with improving the way the EU develops policy. That would be the fact that TARTLE can connect the government with willing participants who can provide feedback on the policy in real time. The government can talk to citizens as they are affected by the policy and more quickly determine whether or not it is working as designed as well as gauge any unintended consequences which so often develop in such situations. In this way, the EU government could more quickly and efficiently tweak, abandon, or further implement a given policy as the data suggests. That’s what TARTLE is doing, connecting individuals with others so that better products and policies can be developed, all while returning control of data to the individual.

Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.