How are Data NFTs helping build a decentralized data economy?

cointelegraph.com:

The data brokerage industry, which thrives on the buying and selling of user data, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar market that’s projected to reach over $462 billion by 2031. Data brokers act as intermediaries, selling personal information they collected from various sources to third parties. But the lack of transparency in the industry leaves users in the dark about what data is being collected, how it is used and who profits from it.

Due to the proliferation of Web3-native technologies, internet users can tackle legacy issues about how they interact with the digital world, such as the ownership of personal data. In the Web2 world, individual data ownership rights stand as a gray area from a legal perspective. However, the Web3 era brings a new approach to the way personal data is handled by introducing traceability and transparency to the data market. Nonfungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital objects that can be verified on the blockchain, have the potential to introduce a user-centric method of processing and distributing personal data.

Representing the ownership or exclusive license for a data asset on the blockchain, Data NFTs equip data sets with uniqueness and limited availability. This newfound control allows users to dictate how their data is used, limit its distribution and earn them royalties when their Data NFTs are traded or resold. Users can turn any subset of their data into NFTs and then advertise them on a corresponding data marketplace.

Once personal data is packaged and tokenized as an NFT, it becomes possible to trade and trace it across any NFT marketplace. Users can limit the distribution of their data or earn royalties in case this data is resold. Itheum, a Web3 data platform, has developed Data