Monetizing Personal Data: A Two-Sided Market Approach

Mobile phone-based sensing is a new paradigm that aims at using smartpohnes to answer sensing requests and collect useful data. Nowadays, a wide variety of domains ranging from health-care applications to pollution monitoring are benefiting from such collected data. However, despite its increasing popularity and the huge amount of data provided by users, there is no platform where mobile phone owners can effectively sell their data. In this paper, we propose the idea of a data monetization platform using two-sided market theory. In this platform, the data is viewed as an economic good and the data sharing activity is considered as an economic transaction. The proposed platform considers the case of abundant data. An experimental analysis is conducted to compare our approach against the peer-to-peer model using a real case study from the health care domain. We show that our proposed platform has the potential to generate higher profit for both data providers and data consumers.