Earn As You Ride app pays drivers for the data they share.
Continental
Earlier this year automotive supplier Continental revealed a telematics platform that put vehicle data on the blockchain— a move that would give the driver more control over the information the manufacturer might share with third parties. Data Monetization Platform (DMP) helps put a price on the valuable information gleaned by millions of vehicles trips around the world, and offers companies a way to motivate drivers to share it.
Earn As You Ride is the first example of how it can be used.
Continental has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Crossbar.io to build a demonstration of an app that would pay drivers to share information about on-street parking spaces using the DMP.
The Earn As You Ride app requests consent from the driver to use data gathered from vehicle sensors. With approval, the app detects free and occupied parking spaces along the road and any movement that signals when vehicles are exiting parking spaces. This information is shared in real-time with the the manufacturer, who then shares it with a third party to power these type of “Connected Parking” services. At the end of the trip, the driver is paid in virtual currency for the information they passed along.
The concept of on-street parking services isn’t new, but paying drivers for the information that fuels them is.
On-street parking data is already collected by some companies through partnerships with automotive manufacturers, and is a feature available in some luxury vehicles. Many new vehicles sold today are equipped with sensors and cellular communications capabilities used to send and receive navigation data and other road-related information. But they also may be sending information about the parking spaces detected by their sensors to the cloud, which is then aggregated, packaged, and shared with mobility and logistics companies. What becomes of that data isn’t known to the driver, and they don’t receive a penny for it, either.
But that is beginning to change. A more mature data market and rules like GDPR are forcing companies to provide transparency and gain consent for selling information. Jaguar Land Rover has been testing a similar strategy in Ireland that pays drivers in IOTA Foundation’s cryptocurrency to share data.
The Earn As You Drive app demonstrates how Continental’s blockchain-based data trading platform can be used to gain permission to share. By finally giving data owners a cut of the information monitization ecosystem, automotive manufacturers may be able to encourage drivers to continue to share the data they have unwittingly been passing along for years.
