Many people look at TARTLE and expect it to be a complicated concept.
But really, it’s a lot like selling a cup of coffee in a cafe.
If someone enters the store and wants to buy your coffee, you have the freedom to decide whether or not you want to give them that. As a business owner, you’ll want to maximize your profits whenever and wherever you can. But you also need to be firm about store policy and refuse to serve customers who are not following the rules, like if they enter without wearing a mask.
This basic exchange of goods and services has been around forever. And the concept is easy to understand because it’s tangible. Now, how is TARTLE applying this to data?
The internet is everywhere, even when we’re offline. Everything that we do today is being watched, recorded, tracked, and stored somewhere. You are being profiled and monitored for future reference. That’s how the world works right now—but we’re here to say that it doesn’t need to continue like this.
All the information that’s on you is, obviously, yours. You rightfully own your personal information. They’re all the cups of coffee you never got to sell, because someone decided to go ahead and sell them for you.
Your phone, desktop, laptop, Fitbit, Smart TV, iPad, smart refrigerator, car, and basically anything that’s even remotely related to modern technology—all these gadgets are filling out data packets that you deserve to earn from.
So where does TARTLE come in?
TARTLE lets you consolidate all your personal information so that you can directly sell it to buyers around the world. Think of us as your coffee shop. We are the place that allows you to set up your equipment, brew your cups of coffee, and sell them to the customers that come in. Except we don’t demand that you pay rent, or give us a cut of your profits. You are free to set up shop and sell your data on our platform, always.
We’ve let big tech make money off of us for far too long. As we continue to innovate new technologies, it’s becoming more crucial for us to create ethical sources of data.
We want to help forge secure, direct, and authentic connections between buyers and sellers. Helping humanity evolve with technologies that are considerate of our growth on this earth. That’s what TARTLE is about.
What’s your cup of coffee worth?
Let's talk lifestyle. Like many of the guests on T-Cast Lauren Imparato has an impressive resume. She has worked on Wall Street, been a Morgan Stanley VP and the founder of health, lifestyle, and wellness company I.AM.YOU. She is also the author of the international bestseller, RETOX, which presents a unique and realistic take on health and wellness for real life.
Tired of the constant calls for dietary purity, radical changes in lifestyle, constant pushes to seek some sort of perfection in this world, Lauren wanted to offer something else. Something for regular people who lead normal lives with jobs and family. People for whom always preparing the perfect healthy meal is difficult and whose lives exclude the possibility of spending hours a day doing…anything other than what is needed for the present moment can wrap their heads around.
The kind of diet and lifestyle changes most health and fitness people recommend are just not sustainable in the long term for most people. Whether it’s a vegan diet, keto, carnivore, no TV, etc, these things are all but impossible to keep up for more than a few weeks or months for the vast majority of people who are mostly concerned with getting bills paid and having a bit left over. The fact is that the present climate of the health and wellness world fuels a boom and bust cycle that in turn feeds into the already high levels of stress and anxiety experienced by the modern westerner. Lauren wrote RETOX to remind people that it’s okay to enjoy life a little bit. To go out dancing and have a steak from time to time. She’s sort of like the Ramones of the health word, sick of the normal and here to shake things up.
This applies to the way Lauren looks at data as it is used in the health and wellness industry. We have tons of apps and devices that collect data that pertains to our health. Mostly, all they do is spit out a number, something that doesn’t usually matter to our overall health. How many steps you got, how much you slept last night, your current heart rate. For the most part, they don’t really tell you what you might have done wrong and certainly not how you can make it better, not without selling you a mess of supplements and programs you may or may not need. In fact, her focus really isn’t on what you should take out of your life but on what you should add in from one day to the next. That’s because what you need to be healthy, both mentally and physically, might vary from one day to the next. The only real principles are that we need to move, eat, and connect with someone emotionally. Some days that’s a trip to the gym, a steak, and calling mom; others, it might be a walk through the park, a salad, and a date night with your spouse. You have to listen to yourself a bit and figure out what is needed each day.
It’s important to understand that this is not some new version of finding the right ‘work/life’ balance. Striving to find some mythical perfect balance only tends to fuel the anxiety and winds up being counterproductive. After all, some days will require a twelve hour day at work, others only six. You have to be a little flexible and willing to roll with the punches a bit. And of course if you are focusing too much or not enough on work you will need to swing the other direction a bit. If you are paying attention to what you and those around you need you will self-correct before things get too out of whack and damaging.
The full interview with Lauren was fascinating and I strongly recommend you head over to T-Cast to check out her thoughts on technology, the issues with the alternative medicine world, and the importance of taking responsibility for yourself.
What’s your health and lifestyle worth?
Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Guest what? TARTLE has a Tik Tok account! It’s one of our favorite places to post and interact both with members of TARTLE and with people curious about us and what we do. Recently Alex and Jason sat down to answer a few questions from the TARTLE Tik Tok community. Below are some of the better or more fun questions and answers.
Let’s deal with a serious one first, and one we get pretty often.
Question: What does TARTLE do with your data?
Answer: The answer of course is simple, we don’t do anything with your data. We don’t sell it, we don’t even use it for our own benefit without your consent. What we do is collect and store it in an encrypted format so that you can sell it when you chose, to whom you choose, for whatever reason you choose using the TARTLE data marketplace. That’s it, and yes, it is that simple.
Q: Does big tech need to die?
A: No, it doesn’t need to die. It does need to be reminded that it shouldn’t be using its power to manipulate people. That’s one of the goals of TARTLE, to provide a model of cooperation with users and other companies that shows it is possible to harness the power of data without taking advantage of others.
Q: I tried to integrate my Facebook account but it wouldn’t work. What gives?
A: In short, Facebook is constantly changing its rules and often that means we need to change things on our end. We are still small so it takes time to catch up to a company that literally employs thousands. We are working on it.
Not every question is serious or technical though. Sometimes, they’re just fun.
Q: Is Alex forty feet tall?
A: Nope, a mere 6’5” which is tall but not tall enough to live at the top of a beanstalk.
Q: What is up with the burlap sack?
A: Hey, that was a cashmere sweater in that video. It is completely different than burlap.
Let’s get back to some of the more serious and technical questions.
Q: Do we need to give our data to TARTLE?
A: Well, if you sign up with us, that’s what you are deciding to do. Of course, you decide how many accounts you want to connect with us. How much of your data you entrust to our care is entirely up to you. And again, we don't do anything with it except store and secure it for your own later use. We put all the power to control it into your hands.
Q: How on earth do I use your site?
A: This is one of the joys of being a new company, we have a few growing pains. We acknowledge our initial system was difficult to use. Fortunately, we are getting close to finalizing a redesign that is both inherently easier to use and set up to do a much better job of walking you through the process of signing up and getting started making use of TARTLE.
Q: Are we a scam or spyware?
A: No. We don’t work for anyone else, no company or government agency is pulling our strings. We encourage anyone suspicious of us to research TARTLE and see if you come away still having those suspicions.
Q: What does TARTLE mean?
A: It’s actually a Scottish term. When you are introduced to someone and realize a moment later that you forgot their name and have that awkward pause while trying to remember it – that’s a TARTLE.
Q: We need some return on our loss of privacy.
A: Yes we do. For too long, we’ve been giving up our privacy thanks to all of these companies taking and manipulating our data without our consent and getting rich off it. It is past time that we should both get some privacy back and some money on our end as well.
Q: How can we stop the government from taking our data?
A: To completely stop it is almost impossible. However, you can slow them down. Use a TOR browser, get a VPN, and stop pumping out all your data for all to see on the internet.
Q: Do you use crypto/blockchain?
A: Yes, we use crypto currency for payment, which allows our system to be global and unaffected by whatever happens with fiat currencies. The blockchain also allows us to be transparent with how much and the type of data being traded, while protecting the data itself and its source.
We genuinely appreciate our community. There are a lot of fun and energetic people out there who are either early adopters or people who are curious about our mission. We’ll be doing this again before long. In the meantime, we’d like to leave you with a question –
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Ready Player One is a movie that flew under the radar a couple of years ago. That’s surprising given that its source material is a well-known novel, it was directed by Steven Spielberg, featured appearances by a number of iconic fictional characters and was full of action and top-notch special effects. More importantly, it has themes that are relevant to today.
In it, most people interact with each other through a virtual world called the OASIS. This OASIS can either be used to manipulate people and get them to behave however the person in control would like or it could be used to allow people to connect with friends around the world, or to create and collaborate, helping each other to solve problems and improve the world for everyone.
That might sound a little familiar, especially if you’ve been following TARTLE for a while. Social media is much like a proto-OASIS in that many people form some of their deepest friendships with people they first meet on their phones. In fact, there are growing numbers of people who get married after first getting to know each other through social media. And there are numerous collaborations that are possible only because of social media and the internet. This runs the gamut from media companies, to music, to research. Just a couple examples include the band Gorillaz. Its members never met in real life before making their first album, they made their music by sharing files on the internet. In the world of research, people can literally donate processing power on their computers to process data for NASA, including information from the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). TARTLE itself couldn’t exist without the internet since much of our team works remotely.
Unfortunately, just as with the OASIS, there are plenty of people interested in using social media and all aspects of the internet as a tool for manipulation. Such people only see others as part of the system, a part to be bent to their will and for their own benefit. They see data points instead of fellow humans. And these – let’s call them controllers – have a vast amount of control over everything that we see and hear in addition to being able to observe from afar everywhere we go online, and even much of what we say if we speak within range of a smart device.
In Ready Player One, there is a simple plot device – whoever finds a mysterious Easter egg will gain control of the OASIS. If the right person finds it, the OASIS will be what it was meant to be, a tool to lift people up. In the real world it isn’t quite so simple. Restoring the internet to its original promise will be much more difficult than just finding a convenient Easter egg. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of people supporting each other.
That’s more than a policy, or even an outlook, it’s a movement. TARTLE’s purpose is to build, support and propel that movement. We are more than just a way to get paid for sharing your data, we’re a way to encourage companies and even governments to remember that there are real people behind all those data points. That happens when they approach you, the individual instead of just sifting through a sea of anonymous data.
None of this is to say that companies shouldn’t be using these tools to make an honest buck. Obviously, equipment and labor need to be paid for, and the people putting up the resources deserve something back for taking the initial risk. Profit itself isn’t the problem, the problem is a mentality that sees only profit, that sees everyone as a lever to pull or a button to push to increase that profit.
TARTLE seeks to recruit people into the movement to take back the digital realm from the controllers, to reclaim our OASIS as a means to improve the lives of everyone instead of just a few. In this movement, you are the key, you are the Easter egg that can save the OASIS. So, are you ready to play?
What’s you data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
