Senior Vice President & Chief People Officer, Advanced Inds
Search every verified Rory O'byrne interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Rory Byrne, founder of Metro, gave a presentation in September 2019 in which he criticized the current model of data collection by internet companies. He argued that the traditional "corporate model," where platform owners generate data about users in real time, was "built for the advertising era" and "not built for the AI era." Byrne described the term "data collection" as "extremely misleading," asserting that data is generated by corporations behind a "silicon curtain" and that users do not truly own or control it. He cited issues such as the rise of organizations like Cambridge Analytica and surveillance programs like Prism as consequences of this lack of transparency. Byrne proposed an alternative system called "self-generation," which he said Metro is implementing. This model allows users to generate their own data across platforms and exchange it with businesses on their own terms. He described the system as "user-centric," "mutually beneficial," and "transparent," adding that Metro is an "open platform" where anyone can build data generation code. Byrne stated that users could be paid multiple times for each data point they produceched, and he envisioned a future decentralized data transfer system built with a distributed ledger. He contrasted this with the current model, which he said "sucks for everybody who is not a tech giant."
“Right now all the user data in the world is generated on the corporate side. This is the way that internet companies have been built up until now and it involves the platform owners generating data about the users in real time. This has a number of problems, which I'm going to get into, but the core is that it was buil...”
“I say we ditch the word collect and call it what it really is: data generation. Because if we're honest, the word collection is extremely misleading. It gives us this impression that we are generating data and that we own it and that we make it available to the companies. It simply doesn't work like that.”
“Google was the originator. It started off as an algorithm to PageRank algorithm by Larry Page and Sergey Brin's research at Stanford University. When they commercialized it, the business model naturally, given it was the 1990s, was advertising. Think about it: this was the Golden Age of advertising.”
“The traditional model of data collection is great for tech giants but terrible for everybody else. It means companies have to buy data from data brokers which is stale, inaccurate, difficult to cross-reference, and it's an ethical minefield. These companies now have multi-industry monopolies and they acquire new compan...”
“It allows for organizations like Cambridge Analytica and surveillance programs like the Prism program that Edward Snowden uncovered to be created without our knowledge because all the data in the world is created and used behind the silicon curtain.”
“I propose a solution: we flip the whole thing on its head. Metro is doing that by allowing users to generate their own data on every platform they visit and then they can exchange that data with businesses and companies on their own terms.”
“This model is user-centric; it redefines the data collection industry in terms of the users. Businesses get access to gold standard user data in real time from any platform on the internet provided they abide by a few key laws. The users get to generate the data, have control, and it's transparent.”
“Metro is an open platform so anybody can build data generation code on top of the platform. These are open source community-made plugins that allow users to generate their own data. This vastly reduces the conflict of interest that is currently causing such a big problem in the traditional model.”
“Each time a user produces a data point, they can be paid multiple times. This is a great incentive for users to generate data and makes it easier for new companies to get onboard on the platform if there's already 10,000 users producing data with us.”
“The corporate model is where a corporation generates data about all of its users. This causes a host of problems; it is designed for the advertising era and it sucks for everybody who is not a tech giant. Self-generation means that the users generate the data from all the platforms that they use. This means data can be...”
"What If We Generate Our Own Data?" Rory Byrne Founder of Metro Platform You can view the presentation slides here: ...
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