• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 23, 2020

As Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter bicker about privacy compliance, Killi may have found a way to satisfy government and brands when it comes to protecting consumer data.

Last week Killi began rolling out Paycheck, an opt-in re-occurring weekly payment system that supports data sharing. The company pays users to share location, shopping, browsing, and spending data. Then it sells that data, and splits profits with users, which means dividing the profits in half.

The consumer signs up for the service and determines the pieces of data they link to their account such as phone number, email, credit card, and more. Then they sign up for a weekly paycheck.  

Neil Sweeney, Killi CEO, says the consumer has become the product. The company has created more than 100 ways for consumer to use the platform. Users can choose between three tiers of payment -- Intermediate $1, Pro $2, and Elite $3 -- based on the amount of information they share.

All consumer data is being sold, he said. "There are 350 million Americans, and every single person over the age of 16 is having their data sold at over $500 per month," Sweeney said, pointing to numbers from publicly traded companies.

Killi’s Paycheck service puts consumers in control of their data. As more consumers work with Killi, the data repository grows, giving brands and agencies the opportunity to use consented data and replace it with third-party data. The company is trying to replace a lot of the third-party data with consumer-consented first-party data. 

Sweeney also talked about a new Killi browser extension for Chrome that blocks Google from collecting and selling the browser-based data, disallowing brands to follow consumers around from Internet site to site, until the person is ready to sell the data.

“There are two types of data companies in the world,” he said. “There are those like Facebook and Google that have an interaction with the consumer, and companies like Oracle that don’t. How do you get complacent consent from consumers if you don’t have a way to communicate with them? You don’t.”

Killi also has begun to manage consent for companies, especially ones with no direct relationships with consumers, but Sweeney declined to say how many. In the United States, Killi supports more than 100 million accounts.

Social is the next challenge for Killi. Sweeney said the company will support brands and consumers when it comes to extracting and using social-related data.

All these measures will help brands remain privacy-compliant without having to spend too much time thinking about Apple’s advertising identifier (IDFA) or Google’s decision to stop supporting third-party cookies.