Let me start with the difference between the Internet and the web.

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers or devices. The World Wide Web is a collection of information (data) on this network (see link)

That means the web sits on the Internet.

Typically, web pages are owned and processed by centralised servers so to decentralise data, you might use a blockchain or some equivalent technology to tokenise and track the data between these centralised systems.

But what if, instead of decentralising data from the central data processing system we decentralise the data processing system itself?

That’s what a decentralized data server (DDS) is. (It’s also called the HAT). It is a virtual “device” in the cloud ownable by any legal entity – individuals, businesses and governments. The R&D work by Dataswift and 8 U.K. universities brought the price of each of this data server down to less than $3 per year.

What this means is that data can be stored and processed at any entity’s data server, not just at centralised servers. The data in these server databases are called Self-Sovereign Data (SSData), a special legal and economic class of data that is much safer to use and share.

Over the years, Dataswift has built “pipes” and “valves” that move SSData between servers based on contracts agreed between parties and recognising where it was originally generated, where it was used and shared without knowing its contents. The Internet now has a new “lane” on its superhighway for SSData. SSData can be produced by one entity, processed by another, shared with another, all moving on this lane safely, securely and speedily. This legal class of data (SSData) can now create markets.

On top of that Internet layer, you can still have the normal web1, 2 or 3 technologies. The web pages or applications above it can read from multiple data servers, with the right permissions and contracts. And you can still tokenize and chain the SSData if you wish. In fact, decentralized data servers can enable crypto and NFTs to grow and thrive with the creation of data wallets and ecosystem-enabled applications.

To read more about decentralised data processing, go to this link.

To read more about the market for self-sovereign data go to this link.

How is Self-Sovereign Data different from Blockchain technologies? was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This blog post is written to explain decentralized self sovereign data, snippets of it shared at the IFC hosted session on “distributed data ecosystems: heterodox approaches to data portability” at the Singapore FinTech Festival on the 4 Nov 2022.

What is decentralized self-sovereign data?

In a nutshell: It’s data that can create markets because the data subject hold the IP (legal rights) to it and can use it (verify, transfer etc) with “Demand-side” organisations without the organizations going back to the source.

What are the implications?

When data can be owned by every data subject, it means they own a valuable asset that can be shared or revealed to other businesses for benefits, creating market power. This creates the possibility of a “bottom up” data economy that can create a better wealth distribution than the current “trickle down” economy.

How does it work?

Let me start with a basic understanding of the economic property of data. It is a “non rivalrous” good. That means one party using it doesn’t deny another party from using it as well. So every institution with data of data subjects (the “producers” of data) can potentially have their data be used by both themselves and the data subject concurrently, if they wish.

Let’s assume, if you will, that a technology in the form of a cloud data server, at a few cents a month, can now be provisioned for a person or a micro SME to be a decentralized legal entity on the Internet, hold any content or data they have rights to with their own set of APIs. This was what was created from more than $10m research funding across 8 universities in the U.K.

What it means is that data that currently sit in any producer’s server can now sit with data subjects or microSMEs on their own servers. Same data, same entitlements to use the data.

I will repeat for emphasis. It is now technically and legally possible for 2 identical copies of the same data, one centralized and one decentralized, sitting on 2 different servers with 2 sets of APIs for that data, with the same entitlements and licensing rights to share and transfer the data.

Which would create better functioning markets? For us, the answer is both.

The producer’s centralized server has data that is heavily regulated, terribly siloed, badly portable and facing one of the largest market failures in the digital economy can now have the same data in a decentralized form in their own customer servers, now legally transformed into self sovereign data to be used and shared across territories and yet be fully verified by the producer’s server.

Now you’re probably wondering which organization would allow that. The answer may surprise you.

The same institutions that may not be so willing to share data through open APIs with third parties are now more willing to decentralize data to data subjects because they obtain better engagement and create loyalty. In addition, they are paid for every transaction of the data, thereby creating a market for the data that they can verify (we call this a data asset) and have painfully invested into over years.

Since data cannot create a market unless individuals have the right to contract on it, IP rights are necessary. But these IP rights have a great market effect in terms of the distribution speed and scalability of a data asset. It takes only 3 minutes for a new demand side merchant/partner to sign up to a data terminal to receive verified data. No legal or tech integration is necessary with the producer. Across borders. Because the contract is with the individual. So the producer provide the source of truth, individuals transport it, the merchant pays. With the speed and scalability that self sovereign data brings, the revenue multiplier for the producer is significant. This creates an incentive for producers to create and scale their own data ecosystem which I’ve blogged about in an earlier post.

In a web3 environment, decentralized self sovereign data can move meaningfully between services, carried by data subjects themselves to any service provider. Indeed, the data servers themselves can be hosted by country level custodians. The data is always up to date because there is incentive compatibility and there can be efficient bargaining on the price of the data.

Much like money devolved to bank accounts created markets with payment systems, we expect self sovereign data to create large markets, achieving data at the speed of money as any consumer app can have a data wallet to decentralize data and build their ecosystems across borders.

This infrastructure is currently scaling up in Malaysia and entering US and Germany in the later part of 2023. The stewardship and governance of data flow contracts is under the oversight of a foundation set up by the original universities and we welcome public and private sector involvement.

What is Decentralized Self Sovereign Data was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past year, my Dataswift team and I have been so busy designing, building and rolling out data ecosystems that we’ve not had time to do much else. Thanks to invitations from friends at Ctrl Shift, IFC and ADB (thank you!) I now have an opportunity to talk a bit about what we do at the Singapore Fintech Festival Distributed Data Ecosystem session, the ADB reception on their sandbox (Singapore) and at the OpenX Congress (London). This blogpost is the full version of the topic.

The view from here: web2.0

Let’s start with how I view data, as someone who has spent many years working on markets and ecosystems. In the web2.0 world, data is mostly fragmented, with disparate pieces of information about a person held across companies. This world, which we currently live in, is populated by centralized systems that have made “platform business models” very popular. These businesses usually design, build and operate the technology of all three business layers – service (applications/website), data (traits/attributes of people), custodian (storing the data).

Each of these layers in the business stack is tightly coupled with one another with centralized technologies. Almost all businesses use centralized digital technologies today, whether single service or platforms, because they are technically very efficient. Coupling between the layers can be made looser for large conglomerates looking to share data amongst multiple apps/services/businesses, but they are often also built in a centralized fashion. Building decentralized systems require a very different mindset but that’s a subject of a different post.

Web3.0

In the web3.0 world (which we are actively engaged in), data is self sovereign and decentralized to individuals. This separation of data from service is important because self-sovereign data provide agency and autonomy. By providing the “nodes, pipes and plumbing” of self-sovereign data, our clients’ data wallets and services have greater freedom to operate on more data and can also compete better in vertical markets.

This separation also matters for regulatory purposes; while self-sovereign data is compliant and portable across all global territories, services on top of self-sovereign data would still need to conform to a specific country’s regulation. For example, our client in Europe who is creating their “Bring your Own” Identity Service using our decentralized data infrastructure would still require eIDAS and QES.

Separated from the service, data is more portable, making it possible for data ecosystems to be designed and built.

How we design data ecosystems

In web2.0 where data is siloed, it is the virtualization of human traits and attributes. Web2.0 tends to focus on aggregation and prediction for better recommendations with better data products, or to ascertain risks of an individual’s behaviour.

In web3.0 with decentralized self-sovereign data, multiple traits and attributes can now be grouped together across companies, giving visibility to micro-behaviours. These micro-behaviours can be linked up to form journeys that are enabled by data within a data wallet. At Dataswift, we are often called to design these journeys, together with the types of data that form them. These journeys bring the person into a “Phygital” environment – where the physical and the digital interact.

Of course, getting multiple data sources to decentralize their data requires them to come together to form a data ecosystem. And many of our clients do so, because it reduces customer churn, improves engagement, and cuts their customer acquisition costs. Much like how Star Alliance competes with One World in the airline sector, data ecosystems also create collective stickiness. Most of all, ecosystem owners potentially increase their income because every use of their customer data in the ecosystem earns them revenue (more of that below).

The art of the possible

With data ecosystems and data wallets, it is now possible to design and intervene in journeys to achieve large-scale outcomes such as ESG goals. This ability to achieve mass coordination while preserving privacy and enabling agency is what’s most exciting about data ecosystems.

The following are some examples of data ecosystems we have designed for our clients; the illustrations should be self-explanatory.

This customer journey is the shortest we’ve ever designed. A KYC process takes only 5 mins and yet its reusability is of such high value.

This journey is quite unique as it involves self-sovereign data of a micro-SME where the individual is a shop owner.

This journey will probably have huge potential for the measurement of scope 3 emissions.

“Phygital” Journeys

You will notice that these journeys bring the person into a “Phygital” environment – where the physical and the digital interact. And in doing so, enable the full potential of the metaverse and decentralisation to be realised.

Of course, designing and rolling out data ecosystems is one thing; using a market to scale it is another.

How we scale data ecosystems

At Dataswift, we design a data ecosystem for a “triple coincidence of wants” (see my rather dry paper on this):

• Individuals want better offers and more contextual and personalized recommendations.
• Partners want to reach audiences with selected attributes.
• The app/website and ecosystem owner wants greater loyalty, better engagement, lower acquisition costs and most of all, to generate revenues from the data they hold of their customers.

So when we design data ecosystems, we adhere to certain market design principles that will ensure that the ecosystem is able to grow, reinforce itself and self regulate. When all this happens, revenues for the ecosystem owner should start flowing in and outcomes are achieved with minimal intervention. For example, it should take mere minutes for a completely new partner to sign up to use verified data when an individual shows up at their business; they should not need to deal with cumbersome tech and legal integration. This is how revenues of a data ecosystem can scale exponentially.

Data ecosystems usually attract the interest of private equity funds. They often partner us by bringing low-performing investees who hold customer data, so that we can help them achieve a larger multiplier of returns with a data ecosystem.

One of our most visible ecosystems is SejutaKG, which is looking to get the whole nation of Malaysia to lose 1 million kg in weight through changing micro-behaviours and micro-habits, and checking the country’s obesity epidemic while using the market to fund its roll-out. SejutaKG has completed their pilot and would be scaling in the next few months. It is a good example of charities/NGOs that struggle to raise funding or donations and may wish to build a data ecosystem that can generate sustainable revenues for their cause.

We have many more data ecosystems on our design table. Working with NFTs, stable coins and CBDCs are some we can’t quite talk about yet but we’ll put them out when we can. If you want to earn revenues from decentralizing your customer data and think you need a data ecosystem, we usually ask you three questions:

1. What micro-habits / behaviours do you wish to incentivize?
2. What customer journey do you wish to transform / improve?
3. What impact / outcome do you wish to achieve (as a business and as a community)?

If you have answers for each of these, a data ecosystem may be viable.

In fact, if you have a “wicked” problem, have thrown money at a collective outcome, have had difficulty scaling data portability and want to gain advantage over your competitors, let’s have a chat. I’m in Singapore for the Singapore Fintech Festival week starting 31 Oct and in London for the OpenX Congress in the week beginning 7 Nov, then in the US for a month from 14 Nov.

Designing markets and scaling data ecosystems was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nearly four years ago in Nov 2016, MadHATTERs was born. Launched as HATs went public for the first time ­– the first 500 HAT accounts were deployed into the world that day. What a long way we’ve come since then.

MadHATTERs began with the aim of providing a weekly dose of curated tech news but with a HAT perspective: the world as seen through our bias towards personal data and digital empowerment, greater control, privacy, security, confidentiality and freedom. And through our pro-innovation and pro-economy stance.

We believe we’ve done just that over the past few years, and in the process we’ve built a community of people who care about the same issues that matter to us, informing each other as we learnt together. Through HAT News we’ve also strived to keep you in touch with what’s going on in this community of developers and makers, researchers and innovators, start-ups and funders.

But today’s world of tech is a different place from when we first brought MadHATTERs — and HATs — into the world. Notably, personal data is now a huge thing and so is the data economy. Specifically, what we call the Data Economy 2.0: where the value of data benefits individuals, organisations and society (Dataswift CEO Irene Ng explains further here).

The sheer volume of news about data today has necessitated a daily newsletter to cover the pace of information exchange online. Launched last month, Dataswift’s Data News is now your go-to for the latest in the data economy, so make sure you’re subscribed to receive it in your inbox on weekday mornings.

As for MadHATTERs, we’re saying so long for now with Issue 188. But it’s not farewell as we’re taking some time out to refocus our role in the HAT community and fine-tune our voice on furthering the mission and vision of Data Economy 2.0. Onwards and upwards, as they say.

Do keep watching this space as the next chapter of MadHATTERs will begin in a month’s time.

Yours in HAT,

Leila Trilby, Editor-in-Chief

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

So Long. But Not Farewell. was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Alarm bells rang last week when Blackstone announced its acquisition of Ancestry.com. Lots of speculation about why the private equity giant wants to sink good money — USD4.7 billion — into a business that’s more Long Lost Family than profit-maximisation growth, especially given how saturated the consumer DNA testing market is.

Blackstone’s no doubt eyeing Ancestry’s DNA database of over 18 million people, even though it insists it won’t have access to it. But we’ve heard that one before. Blackstone’s not paying the equivalent of USD250 per person for nothing. Our genetic code has immense value beyond unearthing family history, whether as a powerful forensic tool to help solve crime or as part of new drug-discovering pharma and medical research.

But this most private of our personal data can also be badly misused: by governments tracking and surveilling immigrants, by insurers using predictions of genetic illnesses to reject policy applications. And safe to say you’d rather find out about that long-lost sibling yourself than from a stranger using hacked data as blackmail. Little surprise the recent data breach exposing GEDmatch’s 1 million user database got many het up about the possibility of more hacks.

Privacy advocates have long questioned the wisdom of handing our DNA data to commercial firms, given the lack of adequate privacy laws that protect genetic data. And the story of Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells is a cautionary tale of how easily institutions can harvest something so personal without consent, commercialise and monetise its potential without benefiting its original source.

Ultimately, whatever Blackstone intends to do with Ancestry.com and its DNA database must involve the consent of those who contributed to it, and with respect for their rights to its value, economic or otherwise.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

Diggin’ that DNA Data was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Meaningful regulation was one of the main takeaways from last week’s theatrics aka the Big Tech antitrust hearings. In closing Wednesday’s over-five-hours-long session, subcommittee chair David Cicilline stated that US antitrust laws, written over a century ago, need to work in today’s digital age. And to achieve this Congress will have to ‘think outside the box’, his fellow Democrat Joe Neguse said to Axios.

We can’t wait to see what this’ll look like. They’re not new, these calls for anti-competition regulation that’s fit for the 21st century. Back in Nov 2018, digital civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation called for stronger antitrust enforcement to better protect competition, markets and consumers. One of the main contentions (also argued by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes): it’s no longer relevant to use price to measure consumer welfare, given the free-services-for-your-data practices of today’s digital economy.

But US regulations still lag behind Europe, whose efforts to modernise its antitrust laws are now entering what its competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager calls a ‘new phase’: potentially a major overhaul of the EU’s digital economy where tech companies could be regulated like the telco and finance industries. That said, it is still an economic craft to know how to balance regulation and markets. Digital economy markets are still young, and the adtech hegemony is strong. There is a risk that regulation can kill fledgling business and economic models if regulators get it wrong.

Also, having regulation in place is one thing; enforcement is another. The GDPR for instance, has been critiqued for not really showing its teeth despite being around for two years now. Execution of enforcement is also another issue, as Vestager discovered recently when her 2016 decision to make Apple pay €13 billion in back taxes was overturned.

Still much more work to be done to properly regulate these tech companies and rein in their monopolistic power, while ensuring the societal benefits are not killed off. One thing’s for sure: we’re in for a long haul.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

Welcome to the 21st Century was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Wednesday: big day for Big Tech as their head honchos face the US House Judiciary Committee. The much-anticipated antitrust hearing is the first time that four of them — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — will be testifying in one hearing. A quick recap of why they’re there: Amazon for its handling of third-party sellers, Apple for its App Store policies, Facebook for its WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions, and Google for its hold over the digital ad market. But other issues including misinformation and content moderation will probably get some airtime too. Here’s what each of them’s expected to tell Congress as they try to convince lawmakers that big is still beautiful.

But the working-together-to-fight-COVID-19 honeymoon is over. The current pandemic has only increased our reliance on Big Tech, further strengthening their dominance. And these tech companies continue to use their unparalleled access to data to consolidate their power. Two cases in point will come up at the hearing: whether Amazon used data from individual third-party sellers (£), as well as its investments in startups, to develop competing products. And if Google’s been doing something similar with ‘sensitive’ data collected from Android phones on how people are using rival apps.

Wednesday’s event will be the most high-profile antitrust hearing since Bill Gates’ 1998 appearance before Congress to testify on Microsoft’s uncompetitive practices. And we all know what happened next: a landmark lawsuit, the end of Microsoft’s computing monopoly, and Gates shifting his world dominance ambitions to philanthropy.

We’ll be tuning in (watch the livestream here) to see if this week’s Congressional hearings will be similarly pivotal for today’s internet economy.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

Big Tech’s Big Show was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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America’s data protections just don’t cut it anymore for Europe. So the EU’s Court of Justice has struck down the EU-US Privacy Shield, described as one of the ‘most trusted ways to transfer data across the Atlantic’ (£). According to the court’s judges, American government surveillance collects more data than the GPDR allows, and European citizens’ personal data may not be as well protected in the US as it is in Europe. What’s not helping: the US still doesn’t have a federal data privacy law in place.

Europe’s done this before; back in 2015 it axed a similar transatlantic data transfer agreement called Safe Harbour. But Privacy Shield’s demise doesn’t mean the end of data flows between American and European companies. They’ll continue under individual standard contractual clauses between businesses, although this’ll involve more administrative work and costs.

The UK has a whole lot more at stake. For UK-EU data to continue flowing freely post-Brexit, the UK needs an EU adequacy decision recognising it as a safe haven for data transfers. But it may be seen as a backdoor for unprotected data transfers to the US — last year the two countries signed a bilateral data access agreement to help their law enforcement agencies fight crime better. Also, Europe’s criticism of the UK’s Snoopers’ Charter is not a good sign: it was US surveillance data collection that killed the Privacy Shield.

Certainly feels like that data sovereignty noose — which I discussed earlier this year — is tightening further. Not great for a global digital economy that relies on smooth data flows.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

Being (Data) Adequate was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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A UNESCO-backed collaboration is turning to AI to help policymakers beat COVID-19. Launched last week, the Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against Covid-19 (CAIAC) wants to use machine learning and human expertise to make sense of the pandemic-related health, social and economic data that’s being generated globally. Expect a decision-making tool within two months that focuses on three initial areas: digital contact tracing, misinformation and the second- and third-order effects of COVID-19 on marginalised communities.

Too much data, too little time. That’s the driving force behind the CAIAC and several other initiatives trying to organise and analyse a ‘vast’ amount of raw data for use in policymaking. No surprise they’re turning to machine learning for help: speed is crucial to make sense of all this data, given the urgent need for evidence-backed policies.

But many issues abound. If the quality of the data doesn’t measure up like in the case of the UK’s coronavirus testing data, this would certainly impact decisions. And we all know how facial recognition tech is only as effective as the (biased) machine learning training behind it. The lack of ‘robust’ ethics for AI also makes things more difficult in a crisis scenario like the current pandemic. Cambridge University researchers are calling for an ‘ethics for urgency’ — a new, faster and more proactive way of doing AI ethics. For AI to be really useful in a crisis, they say, the ethics need to be already built into these systems instead of seen as an afterthought.

Putting ethics first when it comes to AI, or with anything we do in tech, is the only way we can trust the decisions that are made using them.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

Putting Ethics First was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Google and Facebook are too powerful in the digital ad market, so the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) wants to force competition. Make personalised ads optional on Facebook, make Google share its search engine usage data with rivals, it says. And stop the big platforms exploiting privacy regulation like the GDPR to favour their business models.

Google and Facebook earned around 80% of the £14 billion spent on UK digital advertising last year. But their market dominance is also evident in their actions. Like how Google threatened to cut off European publishers from lucrative ads if they curbed the search engine’s data collection. Or Mark Zuckerberg’s confidence that the Facebook-boycotting advertisers — reportedly more than 600 brands now — will all be back soon enough. The sense is that the ‘unparalleled’ advertising reach these internet giants offer make them indispensable. Even US presidential candidate Joe Biden still advertises on Facebook despite his many grievances with it, ‘cos his campaign ‘cannot afford to cede these platforms’ to the incumbent president. This level of market power is worrisome.

The CMA’s calling for a new ‘pro-competition regulatory regime’ to challenge this dominance. This, along with the ‘highly intrusive interventions’ it has recommended, couldn’t be more timely. Spending on digital ads will overtake traditional media this year to account for more than half of the USD530 billion global ad industry. Great, if this also benefits the consumer with better innovation and choice and control over their data. Something that more — and much overdue — competition can help achieve.

MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com

We Got the Power was originally published in Hub of All Things on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.