Tech

Verb Launches Marketplace That Lets Consumers Sell Their Personal Data

Published

5 hours ago

August 10, 2026

Companies have spent years making money from consumers’ personal data. Verb wants consumers to start setting the price themselves.

Verb, a data exchange company, launched a marketplace Thursday that lets everyday people sell access to their personal data straight to companies, including the AI labs hungry for training material, Axios first reported.

The pitch comes as AI companies continue to acquire data from publishers, app developers and data brokers. Verb is trying to change the role consumers play in that economy, moving them from the source of data to its sellers.

“[People] will go to monetize something that for decades we’ve given away for free,” Cyrus Beschloss, Verb’s CEO and co-founder, told Axios.

How the marketplace works

Signing up means installing the Verb tracker on your phone, which then begins logging selected activity — think shopping habits and social media use. Users can toggle off categories they’d rather keep private, and the more data shared, the more money they can potentially make.

Sellers set their own price, though Verb gives an estimate based on how much information is shared. Any company can then buy that data, but users have the option to block specific buyers they don’t want to deal with, according to Axios.

Verb expects AI companies to become some of its biggest customers because developing increasingly capable models requires enormous amounts of training data, according to Beschloss.

The company believes this could create “a completely new asset class,” Beschloss said. The idea is not entirely new. Mercor connects AI companies with people who generate training data or evaluate AI outputs, while Vana, a startup spun out of MIT, lets users pool their data and collectively decide which companies can use it.

Privacy comes with a price

The biggest hurdle may be convincing people that selling access to their data is worth the privacy tradeoff.

Verb says it excludes sensitive categories such as passwords, text messages and health data from its analysis. Still, a marketplace built around personal information creates obvious risks if data is exposed or misused. Beschloss acknowledged the possibility of breaches and said security was considered in the platform’s design.

“If we can’t tell users that their data is safe, then we are not a company… and we don’t deserve to be if we can’t do that,” he said.

The bigger bet

Verb’s real test is whether consumers see personal data as something they should be paid for rather than something they simply surrender in exchange for online services.

If the model catches on, it could give AI companies another source of behavioral data while shifting some of the economics back toward the people generating it. But it would also create a new incentive to share more — making the price of privacy part of the transaction itself.

Other News: Retailers are using AI-powered shopping tools to personalize customer experiences, raising new questions about how consumer data is collected, shared, and protected.

Tech

Social media platforms still facing thousands of user addiction lawsuits after failed appeals

Published

41 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

qasimgillani

Social media companies like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation over claims that they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to minors.

According to a report from Reuters, San Francisco’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied these platforms’ attempt to defend themselves from thousands of lawsuits through an argument based on Section 230, which protects publishers and platforms from being held liable for users’ posts. The companies argued that Section 230 could also protect them from the claim that they did not warn the public about addictive design choices, but the court said the appeal may have come too soon, since this type of appeal usually arrives after a trial.

These thousands of lawsuits, which come from private individuals, state and local governments, and school districts, were consolidated into one federal suit and will proceed as such.

It’s too early to say how these addictive design lawsuits will pan out, but so far, Meta lost two lawsuits over similar issues, marking the first time that the platform was held liable over child safety concerns in jury trials.

Tech

Aptoide becomes the first rival app store to return to Google Play in the US

Published

50 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

qasimgillani

Competing Android app stores are now back on Google Play in the U.S., and Aptoide is the first to take advantage of the new option. On Monday, the Portugal-based app distributor brought its games store back to Google Play after more than a decade, crediting the loosening of restrictions that had been criticized as anticompetitive.

For the first time in many years, U.S. users will be able to install a competitor to Google’s Android app store directly from Google Play itself, a milestone in terms of opening the app market to more competition.

Aptoide’s independent app store is one of the larger Android app marketplaces outside of Google Play, offering more than 40,000 Android applications to its roughly 25 million monthly active users. The U.S. has been Aptoide’s largest market to date, but until now, the store had to be sideloaded on Android devices, limiting its reach.

That changed following U.S. District Judge James Donato’s ruling in the Epic Games lawsuit, which, among other things, now requires Google to allow the installation of third-party apps from outside the Play Store. As of June 22, 2026, Google began allowing third-party app stores to access Google Play’s app catalog through the Play Catalog Access Program. This allows competitors to access Google Play infrastructure, including its catalog of apps that can be offered to users, while remaining an independent store.

Epic Games first sued Google in 2020, alleging anticompetitive abuses in the Android app ecosystem. A jury trial ruled in Epic’s favor in 2023. Google appealed the ruling, but lost. Earlier this year, the comapny said it would drop Play Store commissions and make it easier for Android users to install alternative app stores.

Tech

YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money

Published

57 minutes ago

August 10, 2026

qasimgillani

YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.

The change is going into effect starting February 1. The Google-owned company says the update won’t impact creators already in the YouTube Partner Program.

Additionally, YouTube announced that creators will need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period to earn money through the Shorts Creators Pool. Channels below this threshold will remain in the partner program and continue earning on long-form content, with Shorts revenue resuming once they cross 10 million views again.

YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.

The changes make it harder for creators to enter and remain in YouTube’s monetization program, especially for Shorts creators. By increasing thresholds, YouTube is putting more pressure on creators’ ability to consistently bring in large audiences before being able to earn money on the platform, which could in turn lead to fewer new entrants being able to monetize their content.

As part of Monday’s announcement, YouTube announced that it’s expanding its more affordable Premium Lite subscription to all countries where YouTube Premium is available. Creators receive a share of subscription revenue based on member watch time and views, with 55% going to long-form video creators and 45% to Shorts creators.

“With these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings: when a user signs up for Premium, partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Premium Lite offers an ad-free experience on most videos, along with the ability to download videos for offline viewing and play videos in the background.

YouTube isn’t the only social media company revising its creator rewards programs. Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X also revamped creator payouts by changing its guidelines to only reward original content. Earlier this spring, Facebook also launched a new monetization program to attract creators from TikTok and YouTube.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.