Should we sell our data? A panel on the ethics of individual data monetisation

[Music] uh to this final panel of the european blockchain convention a panel on the ethics of individual data monetization um a welcome from uh me and all the panelists who will introduce themselves uh shortly a little bit um about me i'm the the chair and moderator today so my job is just to make sure that we uh run to time and cover lots of interesting topics uh and ensure that your questions are heard and your your your thoughts are heard and that your questions are answered by the panel as well um i am an academic i am currently senior challenge fellow at scotland's rural college so we work in the natural economy we work in agriculture and horticulture and i particularly focus on how digital and data innovations can help us address those grand challenges that we've got climate emergency food safety and and security loss of biodiversity and so on um and previously i've co-authored um the distributed ledger technologies and public services reports uh for the scottish government i'm on the independent advisory board of the decade center for the decentralized economy so a little bit about me and now i'm just going to hand over to the panel to introduce themselves so um shiv i can see you next why don't you go i thought you'd do that hannah so i'm sure malik i'm a head of growth at streamer and uh just so the audience knows streamers doing uh two things which are relevant to all of this first of all they're building out a peer-to-peer decentralized net messaging network so it's the kind of thing that could power a smart city if you want and sitting on top of that is a framework for enabling organizations that we call data unions um which allow individuals to join these kind of member organizations and what we do at the back end is basically helped get these things off the ground by providing the infrastructure such as the payment rails um and and again that messaging network so this all kind of comes together at the back end quite conveniently there's a few data unions that are already being built uh so on streamer so um this is this is also presumably why i'm here and happy and very eager to discuss the ethics of all of this brilliant thank you maria hello everybody um maria i'm in ericova i'm the director of business development at fetch ai we're based in cambridge we're building infrastructure and technology that can combine ai multi-agent systems and blockchain and looking at several use cases in a supply chain in in data in decentralized marketplaces and so on and uh fetched together with several other blockchain companies has created blockchain for europe association based in brussels uh where i'm chair of the board um blockchain for europe represents international blockchain industry players at the eu level we proactively contribute to the regulatory debate by supporting european decision makers in their goal to make blockchain technology a success so i'm representing these two institutions today and i look forward to our our discussion welcome with both your hats on thank you um bruce hello hi my name is bruce pond i'm one of the founders of ocean protocol as well as bigchaindb uh we've been in space since 2013 uh with a company called the scribe where it was one of the very first goes at nfts which seems to be quite hot nowadays and i used to build a lot of banks so with ocean protocol our mission is complementary to uh many of the other uh teams on this panel it's to unlock a data economy by allowing people to buy sell and access data in ways that preserve their privacy and give them comfort brilliant thank you andre hi everyone uh my name is andra georgesko i am co-founder of the district app which is a new generation social media network decentralized lives 100 on the blockchain uh on the internet computer uh designed and created by dfinity um and uh we are building districts uh with a big focus on uh users owning their own data and uh managing their own identity without relying you know uh without empowering a third party to to do that on their behalf thank you and luca have we got hi everyone my name hi everyone my name is luca and i uh lead the product at oasis labs and which is a company based in san francisco and we have created a layer one blockchain that adds the property of being scalable and embedding privacy which means that developers can write smart contracts that can keep the data private and confidential and we're also building an api for abstracting a lot of the complexity of blockchain and serving the properties to enterprises who want to deal with that without having to learn all day like blockchain code uh we work we promote this idea of open finance and responsible data economy and i'd love to talk more about this later thank you very much everyone all right so um let's um move to our first discussion topic and um it's kind of very much set in the context of now what shift have you seen in the last year in terms of attitudes about sharing personal data and i want to think about it from kind of two lenses from the citizen lens and from company's lens as as well bruce may i ask you to go first sure um you know i i think that it's very clear to most people that um the big platforms are being seen as more of a threat than a benefit and many are looking at ways to be able to gain more independence and gain more control one of the things that we've seen particularly with ocean is people want to share their data they know the value of it that there is some value but there's two problems number one is they don't feel safe that when they share their data that that data is gonna be treated with respect and according to their wishes and secondly they actually have no idea how much it's worth and so um ocean actually is is exactly about this is to give people kind of the tools so they can feel safe and sharing the data but also additionally a way for them to see how valuable that data is and uh if we can give people that sense of control then they're going to feel much better and go against this kind of all tech is evil and any large company that takes my data is going to be abusing it meanwhile on the company side people on the company side are seeing that data is a liability uh in some sense especially if it's personal data they they want to monetize it they see the value of it but they also know that they're on notice from particularly the european union that if they do something wrong they're going to get a big fine okay um do you agree with that uh thread um other thoughts i think we have seen that not just uh in last year and last year you know maybe more and more particular but but over the time i think what we're seeing is that you know large companies large you know big tech is offering certain free services but as a result we're all losing you know our privacy our data that is that is uh near and dear to us all right so um these companies know where we go on holidays what we eat you know what we what we shop for and and it's a little bit scary and and i you know i think because we work in the tech industry i think we realize that more than perhaps you know some other people but there are some really nice documentaries about these for example on netflix i would really highly recommend people watch that too to really understand the impact and so what we're doing in the blockchain in this blockchain space is is really offering uh alternative solutions i think that's that's what we need to you know present and what we need to be able to show and discuss uh you know how can we how can we have some some other uh opportunities what what can we do with these opportunities what can we do with our with our data and and how can we uh share that privately securely and and um how it can be trusted how the system can be trusted so uh i'm really on board with this discussion and uh there are really new opportunities uh going forward thank you luca what are your thoughts i'd say we're seeing maybe two or three uh big trends um we've been in this in this business for a few years now um and and i was personally in the uh did up in the business of data even before um so i think i've seen like three three big trends the first one is um very large companies uh namely apple uh doing a like increasingly um based developer position on on protecting users data and this is uh maybe not really changing the way uh users own the data but it's raising a ton of awareness in a the way you communicate the way apps communicate with users and be the way users care about their data the second big trend we're seeing it's in mid companies mid-stage companies mid-sized companies who are increasingly switching their value proposition to actually embed privacy as a benefit of their product um you can think of one company we work with called nebula they they are a privacy preserving version of 23andme and they go to market saying uh when you take your dna test uh your your test is actually released uh to essentially everyone and you lose control and you don't really know how this data is going to be used over the next 20 years but if you embed privacy in it um you will retain ownership of the data and then they convince more people to to take the test and then um the cool thing is that the users will be able to monetize their data and to do something with their data or to make the data available to specific causes because even when they do so the privacy is guaranteed and then the third thing that we are that we're seeing is an awareness around the uh data breaches right uh there's more and more services that would alert people with information such as hey your your account has been compromised on this website you need to do something to protect your password you need to do something to protect your um account in general and so people are becoming more aware because of these three um pushes and forces that we're seeing now this um difference with before it's actually resulting in in two big uh trends i think the awareness which is what i just talked and then the uh the shift in the way people think about the value of their data we often times run run some experiments to see if people like would respond to the idea of owning the data and value your data so that you can get some money we try to embed it inside products so that people are not attracted to that product just because of the data and just because of the of the money which we don't think attracts the people who approach data with their mentality and the response is always like great we are talking about three four orders of magnitude uh difference in conversion rate when you offer something that is privacy and when something that hasn't now this is like a much broader conversation and and i don't know if we will have time to discuss this today um but the big information that we challenge and the big knowledge that we challenge as a company is that people don't care about data the reality is that a product builders observe the market and and see that people don't care about data because no one is offering any any ability to care to care about data and at the same time users are not offered any way to do that in a convenient way and so they're not behaving in a way that demonstrates that they don't care about data they want to challenge that and try to make that uh paradox or that paradigm um slightly different okay thank you andrew your your thoughts on that um i agree with luca that we need to change this idea that uh users don't care about their data and uh i was thinking that a very clear example of the fact that they do care and they care a lot was that wave of user migration from whatsapp to signal that happened recently as users became more and more aware about how their data is being handled and mishandled uh they began to look for better alternatives which is like you said our role here maria is to build these better alternatives uh on blockchain technology so that is a prime example of the fact that this narrative is false yeah um when it comes to the users it's definitely in the last two years it's been a huge shift and they've become more aware people are becoming more interested they are starting to understand and appreciate the value of their data but in terms of the companies i'm not very impressed about what i've seen in terms of development uh i don't see that many services being offered i don't see uh that many uh products and services being altered to confirm to this to to accommodate this and even though i mean when gdpr passed i was pretty confident that things will change but um i think they changed more in the sense that the user has to go through more filters to access content and stuff and not that much in the terms that companies take more responsibility i have yet to see a big case where a company had to uh was found liable of gdpr uh you know violations there's been a few but i mean yeah we expected some major disruption and didn't happen basically that's what i'm saying all right and shiv i wonder if i can get you to kind of reflect on uh you know this same um current period but perhaps uh from around um the lens of what's happened in terms of attitudes uh of citizens and sharing data with governments um here in the uk we've we've seen a kind of change around that i feel what are your thoughts so um just one thing on gdpr i think has made it way worse like we're all just sitting here with these weird contracts of the adhesion that we have to click on every single day and it actually exacerbated the problem because people feel even more powerless right because now they're forced to click on stuff and and they know that every time you do that like i haven't read this contrary i'm just i just have to say yes otherwise i might not be able to see this thing that i want to see right so it's actually made it worse uh for the ordinary person but um maybe i could tell a very brief story which is i was um my colleague in the guardian actually wrote his name was harry davis and he was a 26 year old reporter at the time and he wrote the very first version of the cambridge analytica story um in 2015 because it was actually ted cruz who was using cambridge and not trump um and uh we he said he came to me we sat next to each other he came to me and said look i can't really get the desk editors interested all that much in this story and you know it's a pretty kind of complex story i get it i said look i'll try and help and i'll bring up some people we can put some names in there you know big profile people who like say this is outrageous right that usually works as a trick um and i couldn't get anyone uh there and i rang up i remember i mean uh david frum if you know who he was he was george bush's uh speechwriter at one point and he's like no one cares about privacy shiv like you know thanks for ringing me but like no i'm gonna pass on this one i that would never happen today right so we definitely moved on the privacy front now i think we've got to the next stage where people realize all right i don't want to share my data because it's mine and if it's mine then maybe i can do something with it right and that's the like next cognitive leap and i think you know and lots of people have led the way on that um andrew yang has been a great proponent of that for example in america so i think i think we're there at the populace at large sharing with governments i think has always been massively uh sensitive but can i almost flip the question and say actually governments have changed their views massively on this just in the last like year and a half especially in europe i don't know if we're going to talk about the regulatory piece but you know the on the horizon are three big pieces of digital legislation in europe which will completely upend things as we know um and the first one being the digital governance act um sorry the data governance act and uh and that actually starts to set up these cooperative data cooperative structures uh and the second one is the digital markets act which allows you to you know port data but in real time instantly rather than sending an email and waiting 30 days um so that will just transform the basis of that relationship between citizenry uh people who hold data on the other end like the big platforms and then the and then the rest of uh the kind of innovation sphere that can do stuff with this yeah okay thank you maria any reflections from um the uh blockchain association's um uh point of view uh on the discussion about citizens and governments um so yeah so we are you know having these discussions because uh with with the regulators and policymakers because we find that it's really important to to even you know explain what blockchain is we're still you know sometimes we're still explaining the basics uh here you know we're the expert panel uh but there are still you know many citizens many even among the uh policymakers and regulators that don't quite understand uh the technology don't quite understand the implications so these discussions are hugely hugely important and and we have been really having a a good success reaching out to them and and having these dialogues because we we feel that it's it's really important um but there's still a lot room you know a lot room to improve and and long ways to go so um you know we continue that there's there are also other really important legislations coming in uh mika for example um and and others that uh will really be shaping our our lives uh and how we are able to use the technology and develop the technology so you know ecb is looking at uh a digital euro for example you know cbdc's are here uh everybody's working has been working on them but now we're also talking about that so these are very you know interesting topics but they're complicated topics so it's it's important to um to have more education i think um about them but also i think more education is still needed about what is currently being developed or or being used because i i feel you know we understand here but but i still feel that there are many citizens that uh don't quite understand the implications uh of losing losing their privacy to these uh large tech companies so yeah okay thank you um let's let's talk now about how companies can um better help individuals understand what data um they're giving away and a question from uh valentina as well she's sort of saying these companies have got multiple data assets that are growing because of uh our personal uh data you know how valuable are they to those companies and is there attention there do companies want to make it easier do they not want to make it easier um i'll go to andra first and then yeah so i have a big bone to pick with this one it's a it's a sore spot for me it's really valuable because you ask it's about a 200 billion dollar industry so they have a lot of benefits here and uh i don't think innovation lies in how we tell the user how the their data is being uh is being used sold or because we've seen that they've successfully done so in the past for instance apple uh promptly notifies you if you want right if your data is being used by uh certain applications very easy very uh intuitively do you want this or don't you want this so i think the same could be done to replace those stuffy privacy policies or those terms and conditions that have have turned consent into this very complex uh legal instrument that shifts liability from the company that benefits from the user's data to the user uh himself or herself right so not only am i giving this company my data and they're making a lot of money out of it but if they're not being a good steward to my data uh they have no liability because in order to use the product i've already signed off any any type of responsibility that they might have right so what i think should be done in this case is uh uh make sure that we respect consent for what it is and make sure that the user is educated that message is clear is short and to the point because reading i think it was a survey or another survey a study done somebody did this research and it takes more than 30 days to read the terms and conditions and privacy policies of the top 20 or 30 websites in the world so we're talking facebook you know google amazon everything it this is ridiculous these are websites that we all use all the time okay like we should get mark zuckerberg to do that just sit and read his own terms and conditions and then like just just watch how long it takes to be great you know he has actually moved from whatsapp to signal it was in the news really yeah speaking of moving you know from whatsapp to anything everything else but still whatsapp still has a lot of uh you know users so you know we we cannot say that everybody's privacy conscience and now we're all using something else we're still using some of the tools because they're convenient um let's face that yes but i do believe the shift is coming because uh as opposed to other data lakes in the past people are starting to take action i i do i do fully agree with that so good sorry bruce let's let's hear from you yeah sure uh you know i i think we're going about this the wrong way we need to reduce the cognitive load as shiv said as andhra said the the cognitive load on an individual user is just way too high people do not need more decisions it's like you know you go into a coffee shop you have like seven different decisions before you actually get the cup in your hand you don't want that just give me a coffee so the way that i think from a ux perspective we need to get to i don't know how we do this but this is the big challenge because whoever can do this is going to make a lot of money is to say as a user i'm going to be a i'm going to share my data for these purposes geolocation for traffic management sure have at it uh genetic information for health research for a specific purpose because i have let's say a rare disease absolutely i want that shared for pharmaceuticals under this condition i want to be advertised to but only in for these kind of fields in these kind of areas and so what you do is you can set up some sort of ux where user just says this is the default everything else is a no you can maybe try to incentivize by bidding on my attention but other than that for these five fields i'll allow my data to be shared under xyz condition and i'll also get paid for it um and then anything on top should be a thinner kind of all right we want to use your data for xyz reason we'll pay you this much it's out of your condition but you know if it reaches uh reaches a certain kind of uh breakthrough barrier that you're willing to say okay i'll take a look at that then you'll take a look at that and i think that that would change the equation a little bit uh and that's what actually we're trying to do we're trying to make it so that the user sets the defaults for their data maybe they have a data vault and they say my data can be used under these conditions a it's for health purposes or a research purpose b you're going to give me a certain amount of money and see maybe it gets deleted off your servers in 60 days if you do all these conditions you can access the data and because it's on the blockchain with smart contracts and everything it's auditable you can kind of see this you know we're going to have tools where all that data can be ingested and consumed within a blockchain secure environment where they feel safe and they know that the data has been deleted according their conditions and in this way you make it so that instead of all of us every website clicking in okay knowing as shiv said that we're giving up some piece of information because now it's transparent um it goes the other way where we know we're not giving up any information except for the defaults for the amounts that we're willing to to receive or we want to receive and under those conditions and i think that that is the big challenge whoever can do that is going to have the next trillion dollar company luca let's let's hear from you though those kind of thoughts around the um appropriate models uh for governance um of data yeah so um bruce i think um said it well right um he said exactly it should be a model where users have control and then they decide what kind of categories of of usage they want to support um and they're always going to be in a position of avoiding the trade-off right between privacy and convenience or like usage of the data or the value that you construct from the data to me the the most important thing is understanding the incentives that will regulate uh these dynamics i don't think um any of the shift that we're seeing here uh maybe like in the messaging platforms or in any things are really like significant yet just to give a scale like signal has 20 million users whatsapp has two billion monthly active users so like you know it's very it's very hard to draw a conclusion when you have this um such a disproportionate amount of people um using different products but nonetheless i agree it's an exciting um signal now if we expect facebook or these companies maybe like to change their model because of fairness um well maybe maybe that's not necessarily going to happen right also also because these people are going to say like yeah fairness with whom right it's fairness to the users but then it's not fairness to investors so you know like you you end up in this like super weird territory that it's unsolvable um but when you start thinking of the incentives and they regulate that and you start thinking of a new paradox or a new product that will regulate how companies will value the data how users will value the data and how these relationships between companies and users or governments and users will be will be regulated by data then the perspective changes right so you know that there is this tendency in companies to have a very collaborative approach or a very collaborative behavior with the users at the beginning of the company and then when the company grows um the the behavior that the company has to have tends to switch to a more independent and exploitative behavior because essentially the value of the marginal user is much smaller than it's in the early days and and the flip side is that the value of the company or that service for that user is much bigger because like imaging being without a credit card today imagine being without google maps today right it would be much harder for you at this stage so the problem that is created because of the data is that companies will always produce more and more products um for users users would be needing this product more and the data it's what is traded in this in this type of relationships but if there was a privacy-preserving technology at the bottom layer that would regulate the incentives in the early days right and and companies could attract users um based on the uh protection of the information the retention information and all these things that we discussed so far then the behavior of the company cannot switch over time and the company will always be incentivized to have a good and competitive behavior with the users as a way to retain access to the information and the and the power is always in the user's hand because they cannot access the data without the user consent but even with the user consent the company would be actually not be able to see the data hence um promise something one-off and then like run away with the information i think that would be the billion dollar company or the combination of companies that will that will uh that we will see in the next few years right um what are your reflections on that i mean i was just gonna yeah add two things i don't want to repeat stuff that everyone said but bruce says you're absolutely right uh about that kind of cognitive uh uh overhead just like it's just too much right to deal with and actually there's a graveyard of these things they're already there you know pims personal information management services they're like that was wildly popular about three or four years ago and no one wanted them right they're like oh oh not a data dashboard like this is the last thing i want except for a very small number of people who are like you know very uh uh um very specific about controlling every aspect of their lives right so that didn't fly fine um there's maybe one thing to add um and i've been you know bruce will know i've been talking to his partner trent um about uh data unions and i think there's this uh and how effectively you know you pull web two data into web three uh and that's one of ocean's thesis as well right but you need these sort of vehicles uh you know it can't just be done by individuals it's quite difficult to do so maybe you have these collectives and that's sort of effectively what data unions are but i think the bit that's missing may is actually what um the it's in that european union legislation and it's something you know that we have every single day of our lives when we meet a professional they have usually like a lawyer or a doctor an accountant a surveyor i mean the list goes on all these people have legal duty of care obligations to to you when you come to them right so they can't you know to put it very quickly they can't screw you over because they have uh their profession usually regulates and will kick them off the register or it's a state law so we just need to do that with data right and that's exactly what the european union doing if you want to broker your data so platforms will always know if you have a website and people come to your website that website will always know whatever it wants to do about you right fine if they want to then sell that data and trade it on then they've got a uh under this they've got to have a legal objective obligation duty of care to you to do the best interest for you and that becomes a whole different ball game because at the moment it's a wild west right just do what you want sell what you want and it's fine i don't think you're going to get that a technological fix to that because the web's already built the way it is and i think you know so you know tim berners-lee is off building solid right he got the web and now he's like we'll do this all again and uh and we'll create it from a privacy preserving layer and we'll be able to monetize and and data vaults sort of fall into that as well i think that's going to be quite hard to get mass adoption for that kind of stuff so you need something that fits into an already existing structure it also has that regulation um but it can also help monetize on behalf of users and has that professionalization like legal obligation a duty of care producer of duty to those users so it it it's there um it's coming along all right i'm just going to um shift uh the focus a little bit so you think about um and i'm going to come to maria um on on this first to think about when um data that we've given over is then blended with other data sets either by an algorithm or by an app and so here it isn't direct data it's kind of more like inference or um something like that what what agency can we be given over our data in instances like that maria uh agency well i i think i'll just start with the inferences i think this is really why we or other or everybody else companies want the data right you don't care about the individual data that doesn't that doesn't that's not interesting but what's interesting when you combine the different data sources and data and and pieces of data and and make knowledge out of it make uh information or make inferences make predictions that's why everybody's wanting it right and so um that's why it's it's very interesting and there are already some use cases where where you know where it's clearly visible that you know uh in in medical and medical field uh that this is possible we're actually working on some use cases where you don't even have to share the data you're just sharing uh algorithms uh and using your own data so in a way you are sharing the data but without actually sending it to others but you're just improving algorithms uh and these are then shared with others you know using the blockchain consensus and uh and so on so there are new technologies um available that are are going to bring new you know new revelations or or possibilities for for people to even share the data without sharing the actual data okay andre can i get your thoughts on that um i think on when thinking on behalf of the user which is basically my job at district all the time uh i'm um still i still think it's a priority for them to be properly informed about what kind of data sets would will be inferred from from what they do give up um and this is something that cambridge analytica taught us very well uh when it came out and it's something that we don't really have any information on right now so i don't know what type of profiles can platforms like facebook put together about me which is something that should benefit from more transparency so more light should be shown upon the fact that when i connect with a person and we share a photograph and we go to some places in the background a lot of other things are being you know deducted so yeah educate the user that would be to sum up my my answer let them know exactly which way their data is going and what bigger picture is that data painting okay thank you um and related to this question um luca i'm going to come to you first on this how can we encourage wider equity into data sets and wider diversity in data sets so you know the inference is going to be wrong if we don't have that equity of access and equality of diversity in data sets yeah um i mean despite this is a very big problem we as a company don't really think too much about it because we operate at a bottom layer so we don't provide data ourselves um and we don't provide data for we're not like a marketplace for consumption so i want to preface this because it's very important um given that we don't have a solution to this problem what we try to assess when we have discussions with like data providers or the owners who ask us the same the same question especially if the data stays private and they cannot really see the underlying data is that they need to make sure that there is a good diversity of data sources at the top right in the end even even when you when you switch to other topics that have the similar problems such as like recruiting or hiring it often goes back to to the one problem which is how you increase my top of the funnel rather than the end of the funnel how to do that would be specific to the type of data collection processes and and companies that will do data collection but when it comes to analyzing these in in a privacy preserving fashion the discussions that we were having were around allowing the application to retrieve data for some some some time uh or maybe application to have access to like a subset of the data just for the sake of being able to uh evaluate the quality and and the and the difference uh of of the different datasets they collect to ensure that there is enough diversity and to to ensure that their sources are actually coming from multiple places okay um bruce um some thoughts from you and then i'll come to you so i think um diversity of data access data i think that's possible that's actually one of the core values and objectives of oceans to get data from the 7.6 billion people on earth and the answer that we came to as we've been working through this over the last seven years is incentives we need to find ways to price data or give signals on the quality and the price of data and allow people to see that if it's transparent people are going to be willing to monetize it but before that we have to make them safe so the way that i usually think about this is uber and airbnb 10 years ago you would never have gotten into a stranger's car you just wouldn't or you would never have let a stranger into your car same with your house and what uber and airbnb did was they made it safe for both parties based on reputation based on real-time tracking based on a certain amount of transparency and reputation as well as a monetization which is kind of the core that that glued everything together that allowed this ecosystem uh to form around uber around airbnb and i i actually am very hopeful that in 10 years we're going to say the same thing about data we're going to say 10 years ago nobody would have ever shared their data their private data their genetic data all that sort of stuff but i think that with the rails that all of us in this panel are building in 10 years it's going to be normal for people to share data and we're building that infrastructure that's going to allow that and it's the core is people are going to make money so let's call it universal basic income by another means right where you're not giving a handout you're getting a hand up based on a value and number two is we are going to have the tools to give people the comfort security and privacy uh and their consent in the way that they want uh and that's how we're gonna unlock a baby economy okay thanks shiv on that and um just beginning to think about that data economy then a question from earlier was around the idea of that then creating a kind of two-tier um system uh where you you know as a citizen you have value if you've got more data uh yeah uh that's great question um so i i you know and i've been kind of asked this before because it's the you know the question that first comes to mind for most people who are interested about equality but you have to start from the premise that actually the equality situation uh when it comes to who's earning money from data right now is as worse as it could possibly be right if you're going to formulate some hellish vision of inequality it would be this right oh only a tiny tiny number of people are actually making trillions off of data so whatever this other worst situation is it's definitely a vast improvement on this so you have to start from that premise otherwise um you know you're creating uh making the the the perfect the enemy of the good and but it is something that has worried uh data ethicists and those who we've spoken to uh you know the people at radical exchange have really thought about this as well you know are we are we do we ultimately create these sort of 2t systems where poor people are giving up their data um because that's their way to make you know three dollars a month and they really need that uh and rich people don't so no is the answer because everyone is different everyone has different data and all of that data is valuable to someone in different ways um the the inequality in that regard will probably yes mirror the inequality that already exists but it's possible not to exacerbate it in fact make it far far better um you know people will want to know and it's usually advertisers and so advertising has to pay the sins for all of this they want to know about rich people because they have money to buy stuff that's this kind of where do you go with that but when it comes to opening up things like research uh for medical research for example there are loads of diseases that just don't get bothered with because it's actually too difficult to um uh a find the right kind of data sets at a cheap enough price so this would probably aid with that uh or difficult to to to diagnose diseases um because they only expect affect a small number of people so again this helps facilitate that kind of thing uh or it's not worth making the drug because these people just don't have enough money or their country wouldn't have enough money to pay for it kind of thing not like through a national health service again that's not a problem about the data economy that's that's to do with other existing inequalities so yes um one other thing to say is that you know the way i've seen is people join a data union like you would join a labor union in some senses or or a credit union um you know kind of stronger together and you've got other professionals managing all of this stuff for you so you don't have to think about it someone will do it for you they work for you effectively and they come back to you once every so often and go is this thing okay this is a big substantial change please spend a few minutes thinking about it it's worth it and then we'll come back to you in a couple of months right that then that's the setup that the eu wants uh which is which is great i think that's the right way to go um within that yeah some people who join these things will win out like if you join a labor union in most countries uh mainly in europe yeah you get better pay but it also brings everyone else's levels up too so it doesn't matter where you're freelance you still get like some benefits and you know and if you're a general employee who doesn't join a labor union you still get your four weeks of holiday um you know et cetera et cetera so i think that's how it worked all right are you as hopeful as shiv no i was gonna add to that actually something else uh besides these really valid points that you need to incentivize people to to uh you know to share their data but as we have gdpr that is actually protecting our you know protecting our data i think there need to be also some policies that actually mandate equal this should not equal distribution but uh you know equality in in when you when you make uh in having enough data when you produce certain algorithms that are then used to to you know in medical uh medical devices um and uh so so that's another way not not only incentivizing people but actually making this into policies and and approvals uh and having reviews of before you're approving certain products so i think that's another way to sort of to to equalize um uh the data not data distribution but but usage of enough data from different you know different sources okay good all right well listen i'm just going to have a quick look through um the questions that have been um coming in and the uh the the the comments um hannah while you're doing that can i just say one small other point which is we haven't really talked about data buyers right because that's who all of this sort of is supposed to end up with and they at the moment have just a terrible time of it because the data quality that they get is just awful um you know if you know what those data brokers are and who they are and what they do half of them don't even tell you where they get the data from because again it's unethical it's deeply and when they get found out by journalists they they have to they close down um uh destroying whole whole ecosystems uh as a jump shot was was one that had to close down in 2020 and like that wiped off half a billion dollars after their of their parent company's value and two at least one other data broker had to close because they were completely reliant on jump shot and they employed 400 people and one article it took from vice okay um what happens um to okay the so this is a kind of quick answer um what what happens to data that's coming from things so um can can my coffee machine um be paid for its i data that was going towards shiv yeah well i i've i've spoken quite a lot so i'll keep it short and the answer is yes we should be able to once the the we we're going to end up with the same mess which is that uh websites and the ownership of data and who has control of it currently is just there's there's no clear like laws and regulations over that and we're going to end up with exactly the same thing in iot who owns the data from your fridge is it samsung is it uh is it you you own your fridge why didn't you own the information coming from it that's crazy right uh so we need if that isn't sorted out we don't have basic property rights will end up being serfs again but this time with everything you own rather than just your digital interfaces on the web once that's sorted out i can't imagine policymakers in europe now having spoken to a good number of them like relinquishing this they they want to do it which is give individuals uh control over that data coming from hardware once that happens yeah for sure of course you'll join a data union uh and aggregate your fridge data uh with other people's switch data and white good data because you'll get better insurance right home insurance you'll know when it breaks down before it breaks down all this other stuff is only possible though once the individual has access to that like your car also generating data right who owns it ford okay that was actually the one i was going to mention you know forget the fridge but your car you know where you're going uh how how often you use the brakes how hard you're using the brakes you know who gets this is it is it the car dealership is it the manufacturer everybody else has the data except you as as the owner or user of the car right so these are really as you pointed out the questions that need to be answered and uh then we can move forward maria to ask you a question you guys would have been doing fascinating stuff with that data but like if you can't get hold of it you can't innovate right um that's true that's that's exactly the point like who owns the data that's in the car uh who where where does it go who gets to use it who gets to make the improvements then you know is it the manufacturer of the parts in the car is it the car dealership is it the insurance because insurance also says that you know they need the data so um i can see you know we can see a lot of usage and a lot of really good things that can that can be done uh but uh somebody needs to uh because but then when you are trying to take that data i think if we used to work on this project together you we tried to get actually the data out of the car and it was like you know we were not able to get to it really hard like why is it so hot it's really hard okay um so um a question uh that's just appeared then should we be aiming towards um international laws i mean i we know the difficulty of international laws um between uh say just the eu in and us perhaps what what about international standards let's let's not get tied up with the law should we be moving towards international standards for um uh the our privacy protection but also the uh the way that we distribute data from things um what let's have a a a thought from the the us from luca um yeah so i we are already noticing that there are some attempts to make this happen not necessarily by country but at least by um like industry right the energy sector is one of those for instance uh where um someone is saying why don't we build like a database that has some basic properties and we convinced the largest players to to adopt these these standards and and the standard practices so that then everyone else will follow because everyone else would be interested in getting access to the data so i'd say this is happening at a more let's say organic level um and it comes from the need of like big players to uh cooperate with smaller players and smaller players to adapt to what bigger player wants so this like market dynamic is indeed um like make making that happen uh it's very easy to say that regulation should be standardized and this thing should exist but as always like who has the incentive to make that happen this is this becomes like a much broader conversation um i think the the other argument uh which is partially related to at this point and partially related to the point we were discussing before is essentially around the fact that it's not entirely true that your um your data like the data that the coffee machine produces or the auto your auto motive product produces should be yours and you should be compensated because in fact you are already compensated right that's sort of the kind of argument because people can get access to the data that thing is priced in and it's priced in the value of the item you're buying like you get google maps for free because they get the data out of you right so the question is how do we make that equation work and and again part of that is a matter of fairness part of that is a matter of incentives but if you entirely flip the model and we go straight into the opposite situation then companies will have to make the product more expensive because they wouldn't have the data so they would have to accept like a higher level of risk so again it goes it goes to how do we create like international standards um that depend on market dynamics between small players and large players or maybe players that are complementary to each other in terms of the information they can provide to each other so that then the writing sentence for the right group of people or the right group of companies will actually dictate uh what the next evolution of this is going to be and technology will make this possible more than we'll force people to um to make this happen thank you andrew what are your thoughts um uh kind of being in being in the center of europe i think you're on mute at the moment andrew my bad so i was saying that um i view user data or data in this context like intellectual property so i don't think we would be uh well i don't know if it's a perfect solution because i'm not a lawyer but i see it as an improvement if we could give uh personal data the same uh consideration as we give intellectual property because then it's very clear that uh who owns it we can establish different levels of licensing for that data right so i can i can give you the right to use it in a particular way but not that other way so in terms of regulation and international law that's very complex not sure don't have a very firm stance on that but treating it as intellectual as we treat intellectual property seems like a pretty good start for me okay um bruce you you reflected on um how uh airbnb um kind of ch and um change the change the market with reputation are standards a hope at all i i don't think so i think that governments are i'm it's good to have good government but the best government cannot keep up with technology at the pace this is going any law is going to be outdated before it's actually coming into force even and the worst thing that we can do uh is to get in front of that with all these different things of regulation that are poorly thought out and um implemented even worse and so what we have to do and think about from a government perspective i would look at it if i think from governments and senators perspective is think at the base level first principles people want to own their data it's theirs you should treat data with the respect due to the person who owns it you keep this you keep these principles somehow and you you write that in you write that into law a little bit like what shiv said you stop there and what we have with airbnb and uber and all sort of stuff it's fundamentally it's social norms and with the types of technologies that we're all building we're building in a sort of systemic backstop which is transparent you have this immutable ledger you have technology that kind of enforces things so that the conditions that you want met are always met and so in that way you're bringing in more systemic reliable kind of actions on whatever it is whether it's data energy your movements anything and so it actually is way beyond just the data and so the standards is that you're going to have you want to have thousands of different companies even millions who are working to support this and create new innovation but they're all using this base level technology which is the blockchain other cryptocurrencies layer one technologies which enforce kind of this transparency and so you can use any any layer one technology like ethereum or polka dot or cosmos or what have you as long as they're doing that you're going to have that transparency so you have these thousands or millions of apps that are going to start being able to help monetize data help clean up the data in a in a fair way help show people how their data is being used um and then at the legal level as a standard you do have this basic thing you own your data it has to be treated with a certain respect there are punishments otherwise but simplify the regulations actually make them more basic it's like um when people do tax arbitrage or regulatory arbitrage the jurisdiction even if you might be paying more tax in some jurisdictions if it's a clear clean flat tax it might actually attract more people than if you have multiple layers and different complexities and different loopholes this is the type of thing that we need globally for the data economy to start thriving is a very very simple principle which um shifts from the social norm that everybody intuitively understands into a systemic kind of area where the blockchain acts as that okay thank you um all right and a final um comment just uh coming from the participants here about um personal data being uh like like a copyright um so you haven't written something but you know you are something and uh could could that kind of internationally understood idea of of copyright be become that that social norm that we we have around data so just um very uh quick kind of 15 to 30 second responses from um everyone maria i'll pick on you first if that's okay and no no it's a it's an interesting thought i was just thinking like what what do i say about that i think that's sounds like a an interesting idea however it may be difficult to uh enforce you know copyrights are difficult to enforce in general how are you gonna do that on a personal level we have seven billion people i'm not sure um i like the idea that bruce uh shared with us earlier you know that you you know how you can share just certain types of data and then can get rewarded for that i think that if as he said if somebody can make that happen that would be fantastic uh this one i think you know some ideas are good theoretically but in practice probably difficult to implement and i would say that's one of those okay um lucky you had uh some thoughts earlier on on copyright let's hear from you yeah i think the idea of copyright is something we are we're exploring in a sense that um again it's not just it's not just a matter of like fairness and ensuring that there is a public record for that but the question we're trying to answer in our mind is really um if we if we do this and if we if we bring copyright to the blockchain in a process or certain way what's going to be possible from there and if you look at this massive wave of nfts um the i think the underappreciated part is is the underlying need that is behind the idea of of nfts which is not really like just a like just a game where people want to make some money in the short term which is sure one of the motivation but it's basically the need of representing uh intangible value that that is not possible to represent otherwise right like your copy you you cannot go to a bank and get a loan against your copyright right and that copyright turns out that it's going to give you access to some future value which is the revenues that you're going to make two years from now 10 years from now and so on um instead of question we are trying to address is how can we use blockchain to make the copyright much more valuable than what it is today um while protecting the privacy creating this like public record and all these things that we just talked about and that are known to everyone but also in a way that enables a creator or sore or whatever owners of this copyright to do something with that copyright and to use it as an asset to expand their debt capacity in their balance sheet we're fascinated by that idea we don't know how to make that happen we have some ideas but yeah um shiv what what would your uh friends in the uh copyright world think about this idea uh i mean they're some of them are lawyers so they'll be like great sure bring it on more more legal work for us um but uh um the privacy people are horrified by the fact you can't you know of owning data that they often say look you can't own data whose data is it anyway isn't my data your data isn't where's the boundaries and language is just like that right you use words that i've just used oh no but if i string together enough like of these words in a very particular order i can copyright them i can call them a book i can call them a haiku right it's like what 70 words at most so it's possible we've done this before you know we don't need to reinvent everything in some respects so fine yes um but i just want to say one last thing which is a you know we started the enlightenment if you want with actually a simple phrase from francis sir francis bacon uh which was uh knowledge is power right um and we're kind of in this position where that power is being and is held because the knowledge is held by very few very tiny group of people so you know when we talk about distributing ownership of data really we're talking about distributing ownership of knowledge and therefore power um and that that's why it's important um you know this isn't just something ephemeral andrew final thought from you um i think that like i've said before regarding the intellectual property that would be step forward into making things a bit more clear and maybe a bit more enforceable given the fact that we are using blockchain technology because yes sometimes it's very difficult to prove that copyright has been infringed upon but if you have it all down on the ledger then maybe it's not that difficult that as it used to be um and also i if i think of it very practically i think it's easier to pursue a copyright infringement than it is to get liability for uh your personal data being exploited so we have precedence right that show that this is possible uh more effectively and more often than personal data protection laws are doing right now so it's definitely something that i would uh like to see explored william well listen we've run out of time and what a fascinating uh discussion um it's been thank you ever so much to all of the panel and uh thank you to all of the audience and for your questions and now i think it's time to move to the final session so thanks everyone and see you there thank you thank you thank you so much hannah chief maria bruce andran luca lovely discussion lovely panel i mean lovely way to finish the european block to convention fifth edition we now have our closing and a little surprise for the audience so please stay tuned and again thank you for the panel thank you for a lovely discussion you're also very welcome you know you've received a little invite for now i hope to see you there thank you and as i said stay tuned we're gonna be back in a few seconds thank you