The Data That Pays You Back

The challenge

Every day people produce vast amounts of personal data through the apps they use, the places they go and the purchases they make. That data has become a core input for the digital and AI economy, and the profits from it flow mainly to large platforms and the intermediaries that broker access. Individuals see almost none of the value they help create — meanwhile, the global data market is currently valued at $4 billion and projected to reach $40 billion by 2034. Privacy regulation has focused on consent and protection, giving people some power to refuse or restrict the use of their data. The harder question of ownership has gone largely unanswered: whether people should hold a stake in the data they generate and be paid when it's used.

The initiative

Brazil’s dWallet pilot begins by changing the assumption about who owns personal data. It is led by Dataprev, the state-owned company that runs much of the country’s social security and public data infrastructure, and it builds tools that enable citizens to reclaim their data and decide how it is used. The fact that a public body is driving the work matters. It puts data ownership on the same footing as identity or payments, treating it as part of the public infrastructure the state is responsible for.

At the centre sits the Personal dWallet. Through it, an individual can request their data back from the companies that hold it and receive official certificates confirming ownership. Those certificates are stored inside a Data Savings Plan, which sets out clear terms for how the data may be used, by whom and for what purpose. Companies that want access then license the data on those terms. When they do, value returns to the individual as rewards or income, working much like interest earned on money in a savings account. The financial framing is deliberate. By borrowing the language and mechanics of personal finance, the pilot turns an abstract and invisible asset into something people can hold, track and grow over time.

The design rests on a simple claim: personal data is property with a market value, and citizens deserve the infrastructure to act on that ownership. By putting data ownership on the same footing as identity or payments, it points towards a data economy in which the people who supply the raw material hold a recognised stake in what is produced, a vision Rodrigo Assumpção, president of Dataprev, describes as “a data ownership model that promotes financial inclusion and redefines the digital economy from a fairer perspective.”

Early results and transformative potential

Since launching in October 2025, thousands of people have used the pilot to retrieve their data from more than 80 companies. The monetisation phase — when value begins returning to individuals — is the real test: whether people engage once money starts to move and they can see what their data is actually worth.

If the model holds, its implications reach well beyond Brazil. A workable system for citizen-owned data, built and backed by a public institution, would give other governments a template to copy and adapt. It would also put pressure on a data economy that has so far run almost entirely on extraction, raising the prospect that ordinary people might be paid for the resource they produce.

What would it take for governments to treat data ownership as public infrastructure they’re responsible for, and where else could this model of citizen-led, state-certified ownership apply?