Brazil wants its consumers to control their digital data — by monetizing it
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There's a trial run taking place over a type of digital wallet for data. Consumers are in control and they can sell their data to the highest bidder.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo. This trial run is taking place in Brazil. It's the first country to try something like this on a national scale. Here's the concept. Give participants a data wallet, a D-wallet, they call it. And as people go about their lives, buy something at a store, surf the web, data accumulates. Others bid to purchase that data, and consumers decide if to sell and for how much.

Will this bring in serious cash? Will it promote data privacy? Maybe, maybe not. It's a pilot program right now that'll inform a bill that could become law.

To find out more, I spoke with Sao Paulo-based journalist Gabriel DeRose. He's been covering the story for the news site Rest of World. They're still studying how to make this work, but your bank account will also be integrated into it. And once you allow companies to pay, like to pay you for the access to the data, you will be caching automatically. They're still figuring all this out.

That seems like a relatively complicated process in terms of getting all those various levers to work together, right?

Yeah, and which is why they're still studying at first how to implement it correctly. And we haven't heard yet from the, let's say, the most antagonistic players on this story, which is the big tech. They're still like really silent about it. Currently, what happens in Brazil is that the general data protection law is

ensures that companies will have your data, but they will also be responsible to ensure that your data will be protected. We'll be right back. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Greenlight. As a listener of Marketplace, you're likely already building smart money habits for you and your family, trying to instill important lessons on saving and spending and the economy overall in the younger folks in your life.

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All next door to Walt Disney World? Next trip, share a house at Evermore Orlando Resort. You won't believe what you resorted to before. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo. We're back with Gabriel DeRose, Sao Paulo-based reporter for the news site Rest of World. Is there a question about whether people's data can be adequately protected if everything is in one spot? Wouldn't that make it an easy target for hackers, for example?

Yeah, that's one big concern, especially because we have technology advancing at a growing pace, but cybersecurity is in the forefront of concerns of most people, especially when they aren't really digitally educated. What I've gathered is that we have this sort of relationship with data that's already based on distrust.

We should be trusting companies. For example, once you adopt Facebook, once you adopt TikTok, you actually are creating this trust transaction. You are trusting them with your data. And today we use these services and we don't trust them, but we still use them. We feel like we need them.

And once you start seeing data as a commercial asset, you stop caring so much about who

is going to have your data, but maybe you start to factor more things like how much this company is going to pay me for my data? Because there's already cynical perspective that, oh, everybody already has my data and everybody's already doing what they want with my data. Why don't I take a share of it? I understand that there's also things to worry about, like if everybody's getting paid for their data and potentially there's a bidding for data, could this increase the cost?

and price of data, and could that lead to unintended consequences if, say, smaller companies are shut out of that market?

Yeah, it definitely creates a bigger barrier for entry for companies, but it's also a problem in the public services standpoint. Let's say both public and private companies that still work for public services that may need data for, let's say,

foster better public transportation and they don't have enough budget to pay for data, they may end up developing worse kind of products or solutions based on the less data they will be able to gather. And ultimately, this may end up in a scenario where public services may end up with less data and less important information than

private companies. When it comes to the data sovereignty, this is very concerning. Why Brazil, in terms of being the first country to do a nationwide test like this? Why is it happening there as opposed to anywhere else? Because Brazil has already established, like since 2014, strict laws for regulating the internet and their general data protection law came as an advancement

on that and it happened in like 2020. And this new bill should be like another step in which at the best case scenario, people would have this very granular control of their data. So this could be, when used correctly, it could be

a very pioneering and solid way to control your data, to control the way in which you protect your privacy. But this also happens because Brazil has been paving this ground for advancing and dealing with data on a federal level for a long time.

That was Gabriel de Ros with the new site, Rest of World. We'll have a link to his story about Brazil's D-Wallet pilot program on our website, marketplacetech.org. By the way, the accounting firm PwC calculates data monetization could be a $40 billion global market in just a matter of a few years. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. I'm Novosafo, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.

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