HODA is pleased to announce a change in its corporate structure. After more than a year of fruitful collaboration and support for the development of the assets of our Innovative Startup, Cooptech (the innovation vehicle of the League of Cooperatives) and Hoda have separated. Ownership of Hoda’s shares has passed entirely to the company’s workers and founders. It is a decision that has been agreed and implemented by the parties to further support the activity and purpose of HODA, ie to build people (consumer) protagonism in a Big Data world that it’s every day more and more data-driven. The new structure allows in fact to affirm with even more force, without leaving doubts, the clear neutrality of Hoda to the market. HODA as Company has always act on people side, for citizens and consumers, pursuing objectives strongly inspired by social sustainability and aimed at building concrete benefits for everyone. Hoda thanks Cooptech for the sincere and selfless attention to our goals, shown also in this last decision.

Hoda srl is an innovative start up that takes care of valuing, through the use of technology, the information used in the market research. It developed an APP, Weople, that allow people to exercise their new rights enshrined by a european regulation, in force from 25 May 2018, known as GDPR (2016/679), which favours a new protagonism, both economic and cultural to the consumer in the digital sector. The new Regulation has created a great opportunity for the people to take possess of their data and to increase the competition within the data market itself. We speak of the amount of data every one of us produces daily and how those data are currently entirely exploited by others. Weople helps people to freely exercise the rights enshrined by the GDPR, like the portability of their data or the review of the consents gave to the owners of our data.

Other than giving everyone a platform to activate their new rights, Weople will allow the users to receive information and services and to obtain an economic gain from the market for their data. Digital data are an economic good and is being exchanged on the market since many years. It’s fundamental that people participate to these benefits as mature and conscious protagonists.

Hindering it would mean not only to inhibit the citizen of his right, but also consolidating the position of the few that today controls and valorise data on the market. Doing so would favour the current oligopoly on the economic use of data, reducing the space for free concurrency and also double penalizing the consumer, bound by an oligopolistic market that uses a good belonging to him to generate services and products that are then sold without the citizen being able to receive any remuneration.

Weople is different also because doesn’t trade personal data, it respects privacy and only evaluate aggregate and anonymized data.Everyone is free to deposit and remove what he wants: data will always remain segregated, protected and available to the subscriber and will never be released in personal form; Weople will treat them only in aggregate and anonymous form. Hoda (the company that manages Weople) will then transfer to the same users and data holders, as specified on the site, 90% of the income, net of expenses, coming from the evaluation and processing of the data.

Now, after seeing this approach and these attentions, it is really difficult to understand why this initiative is sometimes referred as “trade of personal data”. And it is even less understandable if a small innovative start-up, acting in the preeminent interest and with economic benefit of the Weople App’s users, would be blocked while so young by national and European authorities, when there are web giants that have created multi-billion dollar oligopolies on data and large companies that continue to trade them without any benefit to the data owner, who often remains unaware of the whole affair.

Hoda srl