We are generating more data than ever before – and it is changing business as we know it.

US market intelligence organisation IDC predicts that the “global datasphere” will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025 as every element of our world becomes increasingly digitised.

This explosion is the fuel powering the data economy – but it can only work with trust, the bedrock from which this oil flows. We know from research such as Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2019 that brands who build trust are rewarded, but we also know that trust is tremendously fragile, hard won and easily broken. Factors, however, are combining to force behaviour change in the online marketing model in particular.

Third-party cookies, used for decades by marketers to track online consumer behaviour and target ads, are being killed off by a combination of privacy legislation such as Europe’s GDPR and tracking prevention technology used by browsers including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. With the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) also firing warning shots at the $200bn dollar adtech industry over potential misuse of personal data, even as companies scramble to respond to growing consumer demand for more personalised products and services, it is clear a new way forward is needed that doesn’t require brands to rely on increasingly outmoded tracking technology or centralising data.

We know that innovation flourishes where data is shared; when brands collaborate for greater insight. Customer data, though, is often closely guarded because of its commercial value, leading to blocks on sharing and subsequent stunting of both business and data economy potential.

Our solution to this, rather than simply repurposing existing tracking technology, has been to re-imagine connectivity and co-operation, designing privacy-by-design tech to power trusted and secure collaboration.

What do we mean by that? Simply that trusted partnerships stem from parties being able to collaborate and maximise actionable insights from a unified customer view, without any of that data actually being shared.

InfoSum is powering trust in the data economy, predominantly by removing the need for it in the first place. Data uploaded to our Unified Data Platform remains under the control of its owner and never moves. Our ground-breaking insights engine, meanwhile, allows an anonymous virtual representation of that data to be built for analysis. This returns results which are statistical and protected by various differential privacy concepts such as noise, redaction and rounding, creating powerful insights for publishers, brands and media partners, while supporting compliance with GDPR, as well as other global privacy legislation, such as the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US.

Better data empowers business, and InfoSum unlocks new possibilities from data, for all parties, in an ethical and trusted way. Brands and publishers collaborating, for example, allows both to understand and evaluate potential crossover in their audiences, allowing better media campaign planning and a more targeted and effective advertising spend.

Our platform and vision are built around reducing risk while maximising potential – and that applies to our payment model as well. Unlike many other SaaS companies which only offer minimum monthly fees or contract terms, we make a pay-as-you-go model available. So, if you work with us on a campaign, you only pay for the duration of that campaign.

As a society, we have become accustomed to the idea that we need to share data to get insights from it – but that is fundamentally flawed. Using InfoSum, the isolation and non-movement of data naturally results in greater privacy and trust, even as the insights generated fuel innovation.