A Primer on Re-Public
Re-Public gives regular people the ability to collect and control their data – a privilege previously reserved only for private for-profit tech companies. It's an ecosystem of open-source software that empowers you to own and operate your own data business. For over a decade, you've been generating wealth for big tech just by going about your daily activities – now it's time to capture that wealth for yourself.
Here's how it works. You download the Re-Public mobile app (available soon on the Play Store) and it starts collecting all your valuable data – location, health, app usage, etc. All the gold that Big Tech has been mining from you, even more than your realize. But now instead of going into the servers of an extractive corporation to be bought and sold many times over without your consent or knowledge, that data goes into a digital locker that you control.
At no point during this process does Re-Public see or have access to your data. It's all yours and privately stored. That said, Re-Public is not a privacy app. If you want to prevent your data from ever being collected and stored, there are other apps and services to help you do that. Re-Public actually tries to increase the amount of data you collect about yourself in order to capture the maximum amount of value for you.
Profits, Not Privacy
For too long we've seen privacy as the problem with Big Tech. Instead, we should've been talking about theft. The theft of value from your data that rightfully belongs to you.
The way the internet is set up now, privacy is an impossibility. Many of us have tried our hardest to maintain our privacy over the years and have still leaked data everywhere. Along the way we have made lifestyle tradeoffs that we shouldn't have had to make just to achieve the most basic sense of privacy and control that is baked into our non-digital lives.
Re-Public aims to fix this broken part of our lives by making the buyers of our data actually pay us for it. That starts by mimicking the way that third parties currently collect our data. Think of Re-Public as having your own Google fighting for you on your side, hungrily collecting your data in order for you to get the most value out of it.
That's because Re-Public is designed to be owned and operated by its users and builders. The software is open source and the community behind it is a digital organization whose membership is open to anyone. The organization builds the software that its members need to run their individual data businesses, and that software is open-source for anyone to use and build on.
Maybe running your own data business sounds hard and unappealing. It certainly does to me. That's why Re-Public will set out to automate as much of that business as possible. You set your terms of use and Re-Public will only broker that data exchanges that you deem appropriate. The goal is for you to be as involved or as hands-off as you want.
Roadmap
To get a sense of where the project is at right now and where it's going, let's take a look at the current roadmap.
November
- Android app available in Play Store
- iOS app submitted to App Store
December
- Open-source launch of mobile code base w/ docs and contribution guidelines
- Founding of the digital organization that will empower users to own and contribute to the Re-Public platform
- Add referral payments to mobile app
January
- Alpha launch of desktop application with data management and visualization features
February
- Alpha launch of buyer's portal on re-public.io
Get Involved
Right now the best way to help Re-Public is to sign up for the newsletter via the subscribe button on this site, and follow us on Twitter.
In December, we'll put out details about how you can join the community chat when we release the code for the mobile app.
Cover image by Anton Maksimov juvnsky on Unsplash