EthCC 2: Gregor Zavcer

Bonjour pari it's great to be here again last year was great two years ago was great and I'm looking forward to give an update what we've been up to for the last year with data fund and the new things that we have well ready to show so for those maybe we started first with what is data fund I guess you know a lot of projects in this space have this problem when they've been asked so the short answer is it's complicated but there is hope so in essence before instead of giving like a pitch we're all about personal or sensitive data depends on the context and our mission our mission is to build a fair data society it's we think it's like a subset of this greater mission this community has which is basically about building a fair world better world and the main activities that we do in a way is reimagining how data economy and society should work how the data should flow how should we be compensated and etc now this is quite a big task it's quite a big task and it's it's actually bigger than us so and we definitely cannot do it alone neither should we so and we'll get back to this later in the talk so why is this actually important it's more about this last year also more about the importance of ethics here I'm just going to fly over basically we live in a data-driven world and I'd say most of us probably will agree there's going to be more data we will know more things to do with the data and data will have a bigger influence in our lives so this topic is actually going to be more and more important and there is a lot of talk about surveillance capitalism it's like this buzzword but it's actually just the beginning so to explain this I will need to make a little bit of a detour basically this is the premise personal data is us so it is part of our extended mind in cognitive science it's in the late 90s there came like this notion of the extended mind it's part of a leading paradigm called embodied cognition and in essence what it says it's like when I use for example navigation on my phone I turn off my spatial functions in my brain I outsource it to a machine and from the cognitive science point of view me and the phone are one cognitive system therefore the data also being used in this cognitive system is actually me it's my digital self so in this sense this is very important that we recognize this because it changes the relationships when there is a company saying that they own your data they're basically saying they own part of you and we actually have a word for that to describe that one person owns another person the word produces slavery so data slavery is actually a continuation of surveillance capitalism that it's now in full swing and it's going to get worse like Shoshanna Zubov says the goal is not actually to control us the goal is to automate us so last year I used this light about social credit system this year at the given up date China banned already 23 million tickets in one year and it just started it's all based on personal data on the data that you give and since the beginning when we started the project we are advocating that in the digital age our freedom depends on the tree own that we manage our data and here comes basically fair data society into the game further data society is a start at the moment it's an initiative with a with a goal to become a fully fledged da before we go back to fair data society itself let's have a word about what fair data actually is it's been for us in the past two years it's been really hard to communicate these aspects especially to the mainstream especially to the people who are not already aware of the privacy issues in all this and we find with fair data we believe we found really a sweet spot people from the government's understand it people from the enterprise sector understand it hackers understand it even my mum understand it understand it and basically how can we perceive fair data it's like digital fair trade it's in essence what fair trade wants to prevent is exploitation of the individuals protecting human rights and fair distribution of value and this fair data should be an answer to this for the digital realm it's also very easy to say like Facebook is not fair data people understand it they don't need to go into the details so the idea itself is very straightforward to communicate and by the way it's not just Facebook it's also the Amazons googles and so forth it's it's even harder it's actually these big guys have forced all the small companies to do it same way so it's like the big guys are basically pushing even the small guys to play the same game and that's why what I said at the beginning we need to reimagine the data economy we need to reimagine the design paradigms so and that's what fair data society should do now we came to federated society also basically because of this lack of business models it's really hard to make a blockchain project and in a sense like having a viable business model I think this kind of dialog is familiar to many it's on one side we are doing things to empower people to make a better free world on the other side yes we need to take care of the cost and there is this question how do you make money and usually a lot of times these two things are in conflict it's so how do you do it it's like in our case if we design a protocol for managing personal data this kind of protocol needs to be free this cannot be owned by us because then we didn't solve anything we just put a different name on it so that's one of these intrinsic conflicts that we see with blockchain based projects now on this dichotomy you can map also this neutral versus opinionated this is more a reflection of the world we live now in my opinion when we look at centralized solutions they are all opinionated and our freedom is restricted because we like the choice to choose a neutral platform let me give you an example so let's imagine farmers market farmers market works on diversity the more sellers the more farmers are selling there the bigger the diversity better for everybody and it gives us free choice it gives us freedom i if i want i can buy cherries and make a salad with onions it would taste awful but i can do this so on the other side on the other side we have restaurants and restaurants are like a good example what means being opinionated a vegan restaurant is very much opinionated and so is a steakhouse and this is good this is good as long as we have access to also platforms to which are neutral then then we actually have the choice so the other they are like this dichotomy that we see and challenge is tech versus social what I mean with that is we could have today like everything done so hypothetically but it still wouldn't change even if we had like every bit of code written the situation wouldn't change because society is lacking awareness because the game that's being played is basically the game of information asymmetry so in this sense you know when we design things that touch the human directly to touch us we need to go back also to ethics as a tool that drives constructive dialogue and I think this is in general it's necessary in a wider context in the whole community and others like this Godwin's law which basically says that eventually every online discussion will end up with somebody mentioning Nazis you know so and you can check it up yourself so this is actually the showcase how a discussion can break down and how trolls can overtake so we need better organizational structures and we need better business models moreover we need to do this and this is the strength of decentralized community instead of saying we are not evil we should design systems that prevent anybody to be evil and to do this though is the way it's maybe a little bit controversial but in my opinion if a project if a blockchain based project is claiming they are doing something public good something beneficial for the humanity and nonprofit they cannot do it without doing a dhow and the general the general formula that we are taking is basically this we use Dow as Commons we used all to reimagine the data economy to give freedom to give the access to the neutrality this is the farmers market place at the same time is data fund we are able as any other project to build on top of this and this is the opinionated thing so if you give an example you know if if in the decentralized world everybody can send whatever file to anybody also be people breaking the law or sending stuff that can be let's say not legal with opinionated platform it could be for example it could build on the principles but it could also add regulatory compliance so it's a very powerful combination that we find but just these two layers are not enough so our current version 2.0 structure looks like this basically like I said fair data da is the infrastructure this is from where other projects can arise on on the Left we see fair data Society duck so-called decentralized autonomous altruistic community I'm sorry this is ultra important it's we haven't done a thing of tau because those are difficult to do and because we want to know what are we actually building for who what's the goal it's an first we need to start with transparency and accountability and give it is a perfect platform for this so my personal view is if you're doing a DA and not starting on give it I'm already suspicious so that's one thing the other thing is we see here we have example Delta Force as the service provider and here I need to give help to the previous speaker because this is inspired by the original the Dow there was the notion of service providers and this is again how it can you know compartmentalize activities and in this by doing this by having a structure somehow like docker compose in a sense you know we can reduce the risk and avoid conflicts so that's about this now fairly the society first steps I already mentioned I already mentioned give it and the dock here if you want to check out just go to beta dot give it dot IO you will see there the third day the society duck and first campaigns in the next weeks there will be a lot more already today there should be more and we will add add more things moreover this is an invite for everybody if you have a project that you see that fits within a fair data society give it is in this regard the perfect platform that we actually start a partnership we write down in a transparent way and the community can also see so that's the first one actually it's not a person it's one of the first ones then we work quite actively on so-called fair data society principles it's the set of common guidelines what we have now we currently presented the first version which is by far not the last one and again this is not something we should be doing this has to be done in a broader circle also what we believe is that these principles will be updated through time next thing is the first reference app the federal app which we are going to show also later and we are launching it today along with that we also have the fair data Society library it's the first version and it's also expected to have more updates now just to have like sort of like an idea these are current principles that we defined and we want to actually bra foster a wider dialogue we have now engaged also the academia so we hope that we will get a lot more criticisms than praise in order to do it even better okay so now it's time for we actually plan plan the demo but the team back home made such a nice video that we said we should share it just with you so let's first have a have a view it's a secure file answer and then we speak more the video is about one minute and a half and volume [Music] [Applause] [Applause] so the Star Trek music soundtrack was not a mistake okay so why did we do file transfer you know on one side we speak about this data exchange and das and all stuff well you know it's we have to start somewhere and file transfer is in essence the most basic data exchange there is if you get this right a lot of new options open moreover it's a very nice test case with a proven product market fit only we transfer has more than 42 million users then it's a bottom-up approach it's like instead of us locking ourselves in the garage and doing a bunch of papers and code we try to provide immediate utility and it's also for us gathering know-how in UX in case you have noticed in the video you haven't seen one etherium address you don't need you don't need crypto you don't need anything it's like your grandma if and everything else would be stable and she would send small files could use it today in terms of the UX actually we tested up until now we have like with transfer something like 150 megabytes we we are working closely also with swarm team and we have the goal that in the next six months we will be able to transfer 100 gigabyte files over swarm so with this we also then actually with the app and then we refactor the app so we can also release a library and it's liability we call FD SJS shorter for fair data society j/s and we also liked it because the keyboards are next to it so it's easier to code is like think and we are publishing it today so feedback here would be welcome and it's really easy to use so an example okay this is the boilerplate code just to do the settings but then if you want to send file to Yoda you do only this so now to show also to also show we were actually we had this feeling once we saw the library and started to work with it we were like positively surprised because it actually not a lot more powerful for us than we initially expected so we are now going to switch to another demo this one is going to be live and this demo we call chatty well today is preparing its Chetty as the name suggests it's a chat app it's with this we don't have like ambitions to create a chat app but it just it took more time skinning the app than to make the chat app and today's just now basically going to show recreate a dialogue between who Skywalker and the other I guess so two windows basically two accounts messaging each other now the nice thing is also this messaging these messages I won't show it now because I don't have the accounts on my computer but this is going into the same data storage so you would see these messages in the same mailbox as your files and everything and when you think about it this is when it becomes powerful this is when the paradigm shift when all the apps save personal data into one place and this is individual's personal data storage then magic can start to happen so I guess the demo is done we see the message yes oh look just got a life-changing message I guess so let's switch back [Applause] okay so just conclusions let's do it quick basically the takeaways if you want to have big adoption we should do we should do apps that don't put blockchain in the forefront it should be same level of UX than other things expectations I think through time it will be even more important to communicate the difference it's like do you want to use a fair data app or do you want to use a centralized app that you don't know what it does with your data behind your back then dream dream is very important it implies values and this is meant for wider community non-us Italian community has a key cast team it's like the best coders in the world but the dream is even bigger and the dream will win and last point which is the key point its collaboration like I said before they it's no point and we can't do it alone fair data society has been built in the sense that nobody owns it those who participate they shape it and you sometimes it's kind of hard to kick step kick start things and also here at the conference we saw projects a lot of projects are trying to do everything also this is what we tried at the beginning and it makes sense because it's so early that you need to do everything in order to have a use case but now we're progressing now we should look what hey what is doing done by who and we should collaborate and we made a shopping list so this is a call for everybody here for everybody watching this is this is what fair data society needs and if you recognize that your project might be doing that it's not a coincidence so the main experts in categories Identity Management we're in the talks already bullets service execution agreements para change to side chains to handle all kinds of different data interactions decentralized governance and etc the list is very long so basically this is what it boils down and it's on us if we do it or not and thank you for your attention [Applause] questions hey man thanks for the presentation I just had a question as a as a sort of vertical I was wondering what you thought of the idea of in the future ways in which we can curate data for example like on a crowdsource level particularly in the medical domain for doing research and in terms of in your own personal ownership of your data especially medical data how that can be valuable if we're able to not sell it but sort of you know give it away in a way that's anonymous but also valuable to society yeah this is this is a very good point it's and also today I wasn't speaking about the protocol itself this is addressed by protocol there is a white paper also on our website explaining it and when we tried also to envision some of the solutions we've been thinking how everything can work along it's not just about you know how to make like these isolated privacy islands and no data leaks out data data can be used for a lot of social good so how do we do this it's we're not doing that we have a proposal on our website we hope this will be implemented within fair data Society and the idea is that in short we incentivize anonymous data exchange in comparison towards data exchange that leads to identification of the individual we and it should also a big portion of the concept how we did it it's a reputation so a reputation is definitely going to be a strong factor in deciding with who you do what and what kind of interactions you engage with did that answer the question say we have all of our medical data and then a company wants to for example do some research now how they going to crowdsource how could they now that we have this platform now that we have this provenance of it okay this will be really hard to explain now here I I'd be happy to explain and show some diagrams outside maybe two things what I didn't mention today it's like we have also two notions one is my data my data pertains to myself the other is our data so this this is very important this very simple example would be if I make a self it's my data if I make a selfie with you it's our data and this is important how we work around with this aggregated data set the other so yeah this is this is the aggregated data set and the other thing is basically with data and how we do the file share and here we also think a lot of about n FTS we could basically also do a supply chain of data so here in that sense there could be like a nonprofit data set where we all contribute our anonymized data and that helps the research then comes a pharmaceutical company that draws upon this data set with having this sort of like supply chain in place we can we can basically compensate people all all down to the source of data another very important notion which I briefly showed here so to address is nice sorry it's this it's basically see there were we have a point seven balanced influence eg data unions so this is also a very important concept that I think is fair data society we will see it coming alive in essence what it means it means if you talk to Facebook you won't do anything if we all talk to Facebook we can renegotiate thank you [Applause]