Meet Fantix: providing fair, open access to data and insights in a privacy-safe way

Data and insights have become increasingly critical to driving our society forward. But we’re up against one major problem that poses a threat to competition, innovation, and the wider economy: Big Tech.

About Big Tech and its monopoly on data

For the past twenty years, Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon — aka the Big 4 — have become an indispensable part of everyday life for most consumers. The tradeoff is that these companies now have access to massive amounts of consumer data that power their private ecosystems.

If you are searching the internet, shopping online, browsing social media, or using a smartphone, it’s safe to say that your data is being somehow monetized by the Big 4.

What happens with this information?

For the most part, the data is collected and used for the company’s own benefit or sold to a third-party for use in marketing.

Take Amazon, for example. Through its own platform, the company is able to collect massive amounts of customer data, including:

• Specific terms that you’ve searched
• Videos that you’ve watched on Amazon Prime
• Your purchase activity
• Reviews that you’ve written
• Your browsing history

Using this information, Amazon is then able to build a complete view of each customer’s journey, interests, purchases, and household priorities.

Why does this matter?

This trove of data helps Amazon build predictive models and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to acquire and retain customers. It’s impossible to train AI models without data, which means that Big Tech is currently poised to control the AI innovation agenda.

While this is great for Big Tech, it also creates a massive disadvantage for smaller and mid-size businesses. Picture this: there are 31.7 million small businesses in the United States, but each knows less about its own customers than Amazon. This presents a threat to fair competition, progress, and innovation.

What can be done?

At Fantix, we envision a future where any organization — big or small; public, private, academic, or non-profit — can access the knowledge they need to make more informed decisions. We believe this intelligence will fuel healthy competition and innovation, strengthen the economy, and drive important solutions that improve our society at large. Best of all, we’re confident that it’s possible to build an open data and analytics ecosystem that’s 100% privacy-safe.

How does it work?

Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) like Fantix has never been more necessary. We allow organizations to exchange critical insights without exchanging a single piece of individual data to protect consumer privacy.

The process is simple:

1. Members (mobile apps, e-commerce sites and any business with a consumer data set to gain insights about) install the Fantix application on a computer, a server, or a cloud instance.
2. The Fantix app transforms the data set into an abstraction of its contents. The abstraction contains no individual user data and is irreversible.
3. Fantix exports the abstraction (but none of the underlying, user-level data) and runs an overlap analysis with the abstractions supplied by other members.
4. Fantix then returns to the member insights about their customers.

The more data sets are abstracted into Fantix, the more insights can be gained, regardless of the organization's size or resources.

Let’s level the playing field, together

Consumer Knowledge is power. Today, that power is concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations. By pooling their knowledge with Fantix, organizations of all sizes will be able to access the insights they need to make more informed decisions.
Decentralized competition was at the heart of American dynamism and growth in the 20th century. It’s time to renew the same promise of opportunity in the 21st century by creating an AI society rooted in freedom, privacy, open innovation and decentralized competition.