The millionaire who wants tech giants to pay us for data in shares .

Tech giants who reap your data though your devices should pay you for it with shares in their companies.

For years, tech companies know more about you than your own mothers. They often know your age, income, shopping habits and the music you listen to.  

Radical plan that could earn you shares.

This radical plan of shares in return for this data is being put forward by multi-millionaire entrepreneur Gavin Oldham who made his fortune dealing in shares. Oldham founded the Share Centre, in 1991, a company that encouraged people to own shares in the UK’s privatisation boom.

Share Centre sold for £1.5 billion.

“For me, it is the holding, it is looking after that account, with the customer and looking after their holdings and then I can really build a long-term business and I did the business which lasted for 30 years and took me up to when I was nearly seventy,” he says.

Oldham sold the Share Centre – the UK’s leading subscription-based investor platform – for an estimated £1.5 billion.

Share Alliance goes into battle.  

At the age of 74, a time when most entrepreneurs have long retired, Oldham has set up a new company. 

It is  called the Share Alliance, and its job is to research and advocate his shares-for-the- people philosophy.  

“The job is only part done, so far. I think we have got eight billion people in the world and most of them have absolutely no stake in the businesses that they use every day, that they work in every day and other people control their lives and I really do want to change all that. I think we can do that by bringing in a new form of distance mediated egalitarian capitalism,”  says Oldham.

“We are literally looking to change things we are doing economically going forward.”   

Tech companies who harvest data should pay in shares.   

The Share Alliance employs researchers at Cambridge University as part of its advocacy for  shares-for-data.

“The technological revolution which gives us a real opportunity to move swiftly into widespread capital participation, introducing a new programme so that data storage and harvesting by tech giants are recognised in share ownership for their customers,” says Share Alliance.  

Excessive wealth and vanity projects.

“The tech giants’ concentration of wealth is staggering, and hardly a day passes without some report of the deployment of excessive wealth concentration in vanity projects.

‘Stock for Data’ will additionally achieve two great benefits: firstly, that there will be democratic control over the way their governance (including that check on anti-trust behaviour) and secondly, that the flow of dividends will over a period of time replace the huge quantity of lost money that automation is gradually sucking out of circulation.”

Time to test the power of prayer. 

Setting the tone on Share Alliance’s landing page, a quote from Thomas Jefferson about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Oldham, a devout Christian and former member of the General Synod, also included a picture analogy, from the Bible, of breaking bread to feed the five thousand.     

You feel Oldham will need the power of prayer to help persuade the giant tech companies to part with shares in return for data that they take for granted.