Nic Oliver:

It’s anonymous. Nobody believes this; they only say it when there’s a lawyer in the room. AI never cared about your name anyway. It only cares about the patterns and those patterns are your identity – they are you.

Chaired by Shelley Taylor (


How companies want data and how people wantneed control. There are now 6,500 companies that exist with the sole purpose of hoovering up your data. From using free WiFi zones to accessing other websites through your Facebook account, everything we do online is tracked. In the wake of the recent data scandal, it was revealed that Facebook had 1,200 pages of datain 57 categories on one individual alone. Tinder has 800 pages of dataon some users. In an age where Snapchat can take a biometric meshover your face to identify sex, age and religion, and Google can access information through microphones, how can people control what they share with businesses? 


Nic knows what he’s talking about when it comes to data. He was selling domain names when he was 12-years-old and progressed to running his first digital agency at the age of 15. A self-confessed problem solver, he now runs, a platform that allows people to get paid for their time and attention – and ultimately take ownership of their data. He kicked off his talk by debunking a popular myth: That data is the new oil. It turns out, data is not the new oil – at least, not in Nic’s opinion. Data is infinite, and oil is finite. In fact, the definition of data and who owns what is a question in itself. 

For example, have you considered where data comes from? There’s first-party data (owned by the company who collected it), second-party data (we’ll come to this), and third-party data (imagine Brooklyn Beckham takes a selfie of himself, and he is the only person in the photo. He would own the legal rights to that image). So, what about second-party data? Well, this is the intelligence that results from a combination of the other two forms of data. For instance, text added by a machine to a photograph that doesn’t contain a human. The point is, the rules around data are getting more complicated with every new scandal and advancement in technology. 

Alongside developing a solution to our ‘data problem’, Nic also spends his time advising audiences all over the world of the misuse of data and AI. He provokes discussion on everything from Facebook charging brands to connect with their customers and Amazon putting traditional retailers out of business by using data to prioritise their own products, to Tinder playing the role of Cupid and deciding who is presented to us as a potential partner.


The answer, according to Nic, is to get people to care about their data. As a millennial, he reasoned that the best way to get people’s attention was to pay them. So, he built an app. The idea is simple: users register and have a clear form of consent (that they can actually understand). There is an option to enable location. About 95% of users choose to do this because they are paid for it. Then they can choose to connect to external data such as sites like Spotify and ASOS before being presented with a series of swipe questions. Every time they swipe, they get paid – and if users want to leave at any point, hard delete your data. 

Let’s use a real example. Think about a florist in Shoreditch. The app might ask users if they have bought anything for Valentine’s Day. Regardless of the answer, can ask them if they have bought flowers. If they swipe no, then the app knows there is a man in the area with no flowers. That person then gets paid if they view the advert from the florist. There have been 103 million questions answered through the app so far, allowing to build a unified view of each individual and reward users for sharing the information. When Nic first went knocking on doors, investors asked if it was even possible. Now they ask if it works. The results speak for themselves. 98% of video adverts are watched by users with a massive 15–30% click through rate, a bunch of great reviews, and a top spot in the App store.

Nic ended his talk by sharing his view on GDPR. “It’s already a future of the past. You have to look way beyond it because consent is already dead.” He makes a compelling case for the changes we are likely to see as AI continues to develop. If IBM Watson knows you have a heart condition by scanning your face, it doesn’t need your historic data because it knows based on patterns of behavior – so what is consent? In five years your fridge will know so much about your eating habits and social life that it will be able to order your food. Where would you plug in that smart fridge? The data doesn’t exist. When the fridge is making those decisions for you, what is advertising? To prepare for this kind of future, we need to start with people – and that means giving them control.

NEXT STEPS … is changing the way we think about data. Instead of the GDPR approach of enforcing consent, Nic’s app already has subscribers who are being paid for the data they are inevitably giving away for free. This revolutionary was of thinking is disrupting the advertising industry and has received press attention from The Sunday Times, Financial Times, Tech Crunch the BBC to name a few.



Shelley Taylor is the CEO and founder of trellyz, software that is transforming the way cities deliver services to the public, including the trellyz LifeSpots app and the RefAid app (for migrants and refugees). She is a native of Palo Alto California (that is the epicentre of Silicon Valley). She has tech running through her veins, has launched companies, succeeded (and failed), and has been part of tech startup culture for more than 20 years. She created the user interface bible, most of the language we now use to describe corporate websites, e-commerce features and functionality (like “global navigation” which literally did not exist before she made it up and got people to start using it). She’s the person who got Michael Dell to put a phone number on the website so people would stop abandoning the shopping cart. She diagnosed consumer diseases like “Mad Couch Disease” for interactive television, “Post Transaction Anxiety Disorder” and "Abandoned Shopping Cart Syndrome” for e-commerce and helped improve the dire state of user interface through the 90s and 00s.  Lately she has been building her own tech companies instead of telling people how to do it better. She built the first DRM free music and digital entertainment site, and licensed music content legally when MySpace and Spotify were stealing it. She has built a ton of mobile apps. She has been living out of a suitcase since March 2017, literally building her current company country by country.


Shelley Taylor:Nic, you said that this is going to be like the Mastercard of data. Debt has created massive problems for society. Are we going to be creating credit reports for ourselves as individual data producers, and can we hack the system knowing that some kinds of questions get paid more money when we are monetising data? We all know how we are being manipulated by data, but I’m kind of interested in the flipside of that. 

Nic Oliver: For the Mastercard reference, don’t necessarily think of it as like banking. Think of it more like Mastercard as a brand that enables a transaction across hundreds of banks. You as a consumer don’t really understand what Mastercard or Visa does, but you trust it and you know that where the Visa brand is shown you can access money from your bank. So, nothing about creating debt or anything like that. Your question about asking questions and representation: It’s an interesting area where there isn’t an answer. We do a lot of stuff to ensure the quality of data is really high. For example, you can generally tell when a person is answering a question. If they answer too quickly, we’ll generally stop them after answering a few because they are swiping through without reading. But if they take too long to reply within a period of time, you can tell that they are reasoning. By reasoning mentally, you know they are trying to work out which answer will create the greatest value in the future, so you can actually create prediction and analysis models to determine the quality of response. We have around 90% accuracy with the data and the processing we do at the moment. I think the tricky thing is who determines what a person is? Are you what you believe you are, or are you what other people perceive you as, or are you what a brand thinks you are? Or should anyone make that determination? There isn’t really an answer for it, unfortunately, but we have a few ideas. 

Shelley Taylor: Can you talk about your failures and how those failures might have helped you with this current venture? 

Nic Oliver: One of my biggest weaknesses and constant failures is that I don’t really listen to people. It’s not so much stubbornness and it’s not really arrogance to a great degree. It’s more that if this problem hasn’t been solved already, and they were that right about telling me where I’m going wrong, why haven’t they solved the problem? You absolutely have to listen to people and that’s what has got us to where we are from a success point of view, but it’s also one of our biggest failures. I’m really good at managing up, not managing down. If you put me in a big organisation, I can sit around a room full of 500 CEOs and everyone loves it, but managing a team is not my strength. One of the things that makes me successful is having one or two specific personality types around me to help buffer that weakness. 

Shelley Taylor: How do you deal with that constant sense of impending doom as a founder? I want something totally practical that you do in that moment. Is there some tool or practice? 

Nic Oliver:  My default position is just to start doing stuff. As long as I understand how to get from A to B, the only thing that stops me getting to B is my ability to put more time and effort into it. My biggest scary point of impending doom is when I don’t see how to get from A to B. That’s the bit that freaks me out the most. As long as I see that path, I stay up and I get shit done. 

Audience: Is there a danger that we’re over-monetising relationships and social interactions? 

Nic Oliver: I think monetisation of social interactions has fallen as a by-product of monetising attention within the attention economy. Social interaction is where this attention is happening because you as an individual are a social character. If you create a platform that garners social engagement, then your friend is doing the job of gaining your attention and Facebook is leveraging the work your friend is doing. Yes, there is a risk that we are over-monetising it, but actually, if you can find better ways of leveraging attention and establishing relationships between different entities, then you can reduce the impact on that social interaction. 

Audience: Is there any chance Facebook will share revenue with their members in a way that they can get paid? 

Nic Oliver: If Facebook came out tomorrow and said that they would pay every user $1 per month, do you think the shareholders are going to be willing to let Facebook shell out $40bn a year to their users? I don’t think so. It did come up in the Senate hearing about whether Facebook might be willing to let people pay for an ad-free version of Facebook. This totally ignores the fact of where Facebook makes their money, which is the future value of data. If you take Tesla, their head of product spoke at MIT a while ago and said that they have 180 million miles of driving data over an 18 months period. In that period, their market cap went up to such an extent that each mile of driving data equated to about $2.36 increase in market cap. If you look at the reason why Tesla’s market cap went over that of GM and Ford, it’s not because they have the infrastructure and manufacturing abilities. It’s the future potential of the data and the AI systems that are retained. Even if Facebook does start paying you totally misses the point. The reality is that Facebook might pop up and announce that they are doing this, in which case everyone will say great. But they will miss the fact that they are still controlling every aspect of your life. The final piece of this is that when you apply definitions of sovereignty and political states and you start to look at what Facebook has in terms of paying you, does that become state aid where you have universal basic income? UBI suggests that everyone’s data has the same value. UBI is communism – everyone is equal. But that is not the political environment that we live in. We’re in a democracy. Actually, while that sounds like an extreme, when five big tech companies meet the criteria of being a sovereign state, and the only difference between the UK and Facebook is physical land mass, when you get to virtual reality and you have digital land mass, what then is the world? Are we fast running into an environment where we are in a communist society?