How to Reclaim Your Data Dignity with a Data Union – Shiv Malik

did Taylor take the hand mic can I have that I have like a compulsion to like move around all the time there we go all right thank you well this is cozy good morning hello my name is Shiv Malik and once again I'm incredibly incredible psyched to be here at Denver here last year miss down 2017 hated myself had to go to therapy a lot so I'm never missing it again thank you John Paula Matt the rest of the team can we get a round of applause for them the guy who like you know goes round in the buffer consort suit he needs an applause right so I'm going to talk about daily dignity daily unions and how those two things work together and here's how I'm going to structure this talk the first thing I'm going to say is I'm going to tell you who I am and how I got into their hands to the state were in with the data economy and why owning your data is actually the last great hope for getting it all right three then I'm going to set out why it's being such a nightmare to get data ownership for individuals and it really has really has been a nightmare for how we solved it gonna boast five I'm gonna give you a working example of something that's already off the ground it's already got a thousand members and finally we're next okay all right let me get stuck in let me tell you about more about Who I am Matt already glaring at me what for the lighting okay okay good all right so one who I am Who am I well I'm a former investigative journalist for The Guardian turned evangelist for the data economy or a better fairer data economy this is me back in 2012 I miss those chinos um I deleted my facebook account in protest the Facebook's IPO and for some reason that like made the news so they invited me on television to explain myself how dare you delete your Facebook account and I made the argument is it like why did you do this I made the argument I said look you know I think we were all turned into in the phrase I used was info slaves Facebook has done this to us and you know this is just an out like Mark Zuckerberg making like another couple of billions out of this is just too much for me and as I do that and the news reader made a really good retort is it look ship you've lost this argument there are hundreds of millions of people who already joined Facebook and now it's two billion so I really have losses arguing like you know this is useless you're just a lone voice fight okay and a lot obviously lots of other people have made far more eloquent protests but that was back then in 2012 and the one thing I realized was that you better fight this if you can fight Facebook you have to fight tetra Tech and but it wasn't clear what those solutions would be so first of all to 2017 and I joined a group of developers that made up our open source project called streamer and after pestering them for a while they ended up building some underlying infrastructure as a sort of a side project if you want which potentially I think changes the data economy forever and it's pretty mind-blowing what they've done is to make a thing called the data union possible Glenn wilds anyone Oakland while here or Jaron Lane EA and that guy um they're from Microsoft Research but they also freelance public intellectuals if you want they would call this sort of a mid right a mediator of individual data which is a mouthful which is why no one calls it a myth but actually a both technical description or instead of bi would be a kind of data cooperative that's probably the right descriptor but for those who aren't familiar what the hell is a daily Union anyway okay well it's sorry it's probably have the only way of finally enable individuals to own and control the most valuable asset of the 21st century information and it might even take down Facebook which is exciting all right this is steak we're in at the moment I'm gonna give you a ridiculously simplified version of the kind of visions of the data economy as they exist at the moment the first if you want and there are plenty of visions and they're not necessarily conflicting the first vision if you want is the open data idea right the idea that actually data should be free we shouldn't put a price on it like everyone should have access to this whether it's oh you know Google's information or your local governments information it should all be on open databases that anyone can access themselves right and that's backed by the ODI and Tim berners-lee that's his think tank that backs that kind of an idea then we have the kind of privacy of deaf people and actually I'm guessing a lot of people in this room and I would count myself as one of them at one point believed in this idea the notion that obviously we should be minimizing data that individuals should be retaining as much information as possible and keeping it as private encrypted etc as possible and actually there's been a success in many ways right the e FF backs this kind of idea of privacy international so the loads of backers intellectually speaking and even more impressively the technical and I have to go into all of this but you know that the technical aspects have been challenging but they're they're actually lots of people are using privacy centric apps we might poopoo them but like say telegram is only popular because people think at least it's encrypted so that's that's been very successful in many sense then obviously there's things like Firefox in DuckDuckGo excecuted sure but the ownership idea what's that about right well it says that in a sense you know we should own our own data and then by doing that we can exercise those property rights and actually that might give us a better sense of privacy right and it goes back to those older notions of privacy I own my house you can't come into I owned my pieces of paper the King can't take it from me right rather than looking at privacy through the kind of more post-war the state will back human rights are human rights a notion of privacy this is a very different notion of privacy but if you use that framework you're more likely to get privacy and also then you end up with the kind of monetization aspect which makes the economy a bit a bit more interesting so that's the notion of ownership and I think the best articulations of the ownership idea have been about authorship like in something too akin to authorship right you know I own this information but I sublease it I have moral rights over it so it's not just like you know here's a here's a car you sell it that's it it's yours now and it's gone and I can't I don't have anything to do with it at all so that's the notion of ownership however it's sort of the backing of this has been a bit disparate like you know the yang Yang Yang gang has sad times you know yeah Andrew yang has is back this other people such as will.i.am the musician of course Jaron Lanier and then while I would think of that you've a Ferrari but they're kind of a disparate group there's no like think tank like the ODI or AFF or something like that right and worse than or it's actually been a complete failure technically they don't have any outputs right where is the result of this it's nowhere to be seen okay here's what we actually have right what is that anyone know that is hands up yes you've seen the talk before that doesn't care all these people they don't know what it is yeah yeah so Jeremy Bentham is a English philosophy came up with the notion of how to run a prison and actually someone built this and they still don't know who did that I really should look who actually built this but that's a panopticon I'm gonna skip this because I think you guys know this but basically this is what we have at the moment this is the best metaphor for the data economy at the moment right the world of data oligarchs and data serfs they don't all agog so Google Facebook Amazon Twitter no pigs and they sit right the center of all of this and does anyone use the internet here then e1 use the internet here yeah every seriously people don't use the internet everyone put your hands up yes there we go good it's get exercise you know uh you all are over there right being watched over okay you guys all know this let's skip that Bell okay and the government's in on this too right and I say Snowden I was in The Guardian when that story broke that was fascinating to be there at that time so you know you come up with a thing that Colorado governor said last night you can't really trust people have a sense that they can't trust just not just big tech but also the state when it comes to this stuff right it's happening it's so fascinating to hear the Colorado governor himself in a sense say that so here's my argument on this in every way given that this is the reality we live in I think it's fair to say that the open data movement and privacy I should have failed miserably right they failed not because of the idea is not being right but they failed strategically they really felt and as people are going to disagree with this and they should do and I think we're worse off than ever right I think that's that's also paint me clear this is the society in terms of though in terms of the data economy that we live in is probably the most unpropitious I ities since I don't know Babylonian times right the invasions of privacy are phenomenal the only open data movement in a sense they have a floor which is they they demand the state enact these laws to open up these private data sets that belong to the big David pair months but they don't kind of realize the state and the picked and picked a car kind of aligned in many ways that's not an easy process and they failed I think the privacy movement privacy Warriors here right yes go we're losing souls all the time we're losing souls all the time were in a position now whether I think the cognitive overhead for maintaining your privacy is so high compared to the convenience offered right by web to that you know I think the poet is proven people are willingly paying Jeff Bezos to spy so he can spy on you please I want to buy your microphones and put them in my house right that is a massive challenge and I think ownership points data ownership points a way out of this right okay I don't have time to get into all of those arguments and maybe even talk about that afterwards but the problem with ownership is it sucks it sucks technically speaking it's a massive technical challenge right so what are those technical challenges right okay anyone know what that is pumping a piece of paper okay relevant this a guy called Chris downs in 2000 right so this is he was the first person on the Internet if you want to try to sell his own personal data and he downloaded his data and he stuck it on eBay and he sold it does anyone know for how much for 200 bucks he got 200 bucks for his personal data right like from like all of it and I say download because I actually had to handwrite most of it because I was some time ago you couldn't get it and it'll form I don't know anyway um we're still in that position now right when it comes to like trying to monetize your own personal data how do you do it well you have to basically stick it up on eBay right that's a sucks everyone knows it doesn't work it doesn't scale stuff gonna go any further than that right so the first issue in setting up something for individuals is that you need a back-end network right you need a way of transporting your data from one place to another right and we've got roads and rails or in a sense corporations but we don't have roads and rails for individuals to be able to do this kind of stuff right and this is by the way obviously particularly simplified I'm not a dev so I'm just gonna go over this in a very basic way the second thing is discovery right people need to find buyers potater need to be able to discover that data rather like Chris towns putting it on eBay that's not a scalable solution but you need a marketplace and you need a way now also of aggregating all that data with other people right so it's the buyers aren't going to Chris downs and then someone else and then someone else and trying to negotiate with them individually you need a way to aggregate at all and the third thing is payment then you need a way of paying all these people except the problem is is obviously these are micro payments thing about right so maybe you can see a star don't see your way through okay I think we solved it the streamer team happened to be at this really weird conjunction of both real-time data and crypto and therefore they kind of had experience of all these things in fact back in the white paper when you read it is all about building a back-end peer-to-peer decentralized real-time data network right in a sense emulating some of the services that AWS provides and and so that's the heart of the project but on top of that they built a marketplace and at first that marketplace was just for business-to-business right so it wasn't meant for consumers in this way to sell but we would repurpose that and that may mean you could amendment you can create products there where individuals could aggregate their data and sell that as an individual product on the date of marketplace we're going to see that in a second and the last bit was the experience of crypto and in fact exactly a year ago on this stage like right here the co-founder of streamers stood and released mana plasma which is a way of making one-to-many payments and it has to be side chain and a theorem doesn't obviously do micro payments either very well so Society aid solution and it was launched here a year ago - four hours that's cool and - that turns into the way of making those payments right so here's the kind of rough advocate architecture once you put it all together you have a data source coming in the data travels through the network when the buyer on the other side unlocks it and at the same time simultaneously pays the the data source through a smart contract right so it's a pretty simple setup but it does mean that it's decentralized and it does mean that it's sort of weaponry and that's really important right because the other models the data ownership tend to be oh look we're a centralized company we'll take your data then we'll give you like discounts right or we'll give you these funny tokens that you can't do anything with but we'll call them tokens or money right it's all this is at least the genuine attempt at getting something where you're the data source and you're directly interacting with the buyer here and you're directly getting paid as well so is swash what is swash so a team has been building a deadly Union for the last year actually they saw our talk is that right they saw a talk here when Henry did on a plasma they saw that talk and they were like yeah this is a great idea we're gonna make some money out of this and it's very inspirational I'm gonna see what we can do with it so great so the last year they've been working away and they pray this watch we're gonna see that in a second and this is how swatch works basically it's a cert so they're based in Turkey it's a browser plugin it works on Firefox Chrome not on opera basically Microsoft edge and the data comes in through so people download this onto the laptop it collects that data they permission what they want that data is then sent to buyers unlocked in that way and then the payments are made back out to those individuals they get up to a maximum I'm sorry a minimum of 70% of all the revenues and 30% goes to squash and the app owners right but this app runs obviously because the browser extension locally on your computer all right okay let's see if we can do this now I'm gonna do a live demo which is always tricky all right can i oh yeah I can't right gonna switch this mic and I'm gonna show you swash in the second Oh computer please don't do this to me now okay I got it I got it hang on okay here we go all right so here's their website and if you want to follow along if anyone's got a laptop and they want to do this and download it now it's just swash app dot IO you click on get swash and it downloads the browser plugin right I've already downloaded it and you can see it up here and you can see I've already learnt some crypto usually that comes up with a number yes No why isn't it working because it's a live demo great working all day yesterday not today all right so let's just click in and see the settings and see what actually this means so you would download it and then you'd look at you turn this is the bit that really counts right you give users some sense of control over what they actually want to share so here are the options right and if you go to Amazon then you can share all of these data points here right similarly with Facebook if you go to Facebook then again there are all these data points you can pick what you want and what you don't want if you don't want anything from Facebook to be shared as part of this data you need to switch it off right similarly the search terms and surfing terms are all yeah ten minutes okay great they're all up there as well right okay I'm going to just take this very because we're running out of time but this is the bit that I like you can at the bottom here we're trying obviously to maintain a sense of privacy right so there's a privacy slider here which will mask different elements depending on how high or low you have that slider right so put it right up to the top and you're now masking the timestamp certain crucial search terms etc or words in all of that and that's really important for keeping users identity and actually you're tagging them you're tagging users with pseudonymous label which gets change out pretty regularly and so it's really hard to DN anonymize this dataset at least that's the intention obviously these things can be done but that's the intention right let me just show you this which is a dated delay so if you don't want to send something there's a delay on something so let's just try this right okay I do it's true John I have a crush on you I don't know where he is okay so I've typed that in and now you can see the data points that are being collected up here and then it going to be sent to this data Union right it gives me an option to delete let's just delete that one because I don't feel comfortable with that but if you dig in here you can see the kinds of things that are being sent so it's from this data point you're generating all of the bits of information that you the results that have come from that search but I love John Paula and right at the bottom here you can see the term itself can you read them on screen no you can't it's not high enough definition okay you'll have to trust me on that one or just do it yourself then you don't have to trust me great no one likes to trust anyone chef Thiam conference what's wrong with you all right look that's a really crude overview now if you're looking at it from the buyers side you come to streamers marketplace you type in swash and you can see that's a product that you can buy I go along and buy it and I go great this is a really interesting data set it's a time-based license so I can buy it for an hour it doesn't cost me much I can inspect the data I can then buy it for even longer every time I make a payment that all goes to the people and the members in that data union which is again really exciting it's a really exciting way of distributing the revenue that's generated from this stuff okay let me take you back to the slides and just finish up here there's an appalling way of doing things so apologies okay there we go all right we're next okay I think there's lots of benefits of data you doones provide I'm not going to go into that point by point but I think if you kind of sit with it you kind of realize what it does is allow people a choice over what they choose to monetize or not it instance' as a meme and it's dancey eights this notion of ownership you're like alright I guess this is mine and I can sell it or not and I think that's also a really important thing in and of itself and it actually gives people money and then you end up with realizing that we'll hang on you can start to sort of pull over other data sets that people create out there in the world and that might just open them up for other people to use in a way that isn't happening now but in regards to what we're doing with what we've got and what we've built out let me just give you a few numbers and maybe make some promises on promises that's the right word anyway bold statements how much is swashes data were right like okay if we create this data set is it gonna be worth anything is anyone gonna buy it well we've had one estimation which is that it should be worth in the region of 35 to 70 million dollars a year that's a lot of money that you'll be generating for a little application like that right and you can keep growing that we know that because there's a similar business that does this in a centralized way that just got closed down because they were collecting it unethically right they're collecting the data without user consent without a proper framework for that so that's how much we think it's worth and that would mean effectively distributing 50 million dollars worth we take the top end of those figures out to a data set or a number of people numbering probably maybe two millions that's twenty-five dollars a year that's a decent incentivization to get people to join right can it scale can we get to two million people right because if swatch doesn't scale then it's not good for anyone yeah I think it could probably be so I'm gonna stand on the stage and make this bold statement I think it'll be the biggest step by the time I come back here next year and you're like huh Scott that's nothing ship that's like 10,000 uses and you'll be the biggest app yeah well we'll get there and we'll get to 100,000 by the time I stand back on this stage next year alright that's that's the bold statement way as they keep me going what the hell are you doing shift you did not discuss that with me so I think it can scale and I think it's really interesting because you don't have these onboarding issues right we're not asking people to buy crypto to get into this we're just giving it to them for doing stuff that they're already doing which is again a bit of a game changer in my view okay third thing and then there's a fourth thing and then I'm going to finish there are more date unions coming so it's not just squash there are other beat others being built actually my colleague way did a talk yesterday about my DM which the mobile app which measures how much you use your other apps on your mobile I'm actually that is going to be run by a down so we were working with down stack could you run these things as dowels right could you have a do down write a data Union down yes absolutely and we're gonna try and MVP that very soon wait a week two weeks longer a longer maybe maybe a month before we get to the point where we can show like a Dow running an actual revenue generating business rather than just a glorified hedge fund that's exciting okay and the last point is the legislative winds are in our favor GDP are we all know about GDP are well there's a little known article in that quadrakill 20 which is all about portability it means it gives users the right to port their data from one place to another great well what if they put it to a data union right from Google from Facebook suddenly that starts to get very interesting the CCPA just come into force well what does it say in that it says as a user you have a right to tell another business to stop selling your data so imagine swash now has a little button which sends an automated email which you're allowed to do as a third party to Google to Facebook to whomever not to Facebook but to Google saying you know how to sell my day great so now I can pour my data from Google and I can tell them not to sell it if we get that legislative crossover great then their unions will be in a unique position and they'll be the only place to do to like rebuild the data economy based on user consent and I think that's really fascinating we are not far off from that being the case and hopefully in a couple of years that will be the case and the data economy would have improved therefore and we'll have a fairer better and more dignified did our economy okay look thank you very much thanks for having this I've enjoyed it have a good time for questions one minute one question maybe is there a question he asked can you get this as the slide deck yeah I'll stick it up somewhere I'll figure it out yeah I'll stick it up so if you didn't hear the question the question was CCPA is about getting rid of the middleman on you bringing back the middleman yeah look I think look yeah to answer that in the in the briefest way what is a data union if you look at it from that perspective it's an agent right selling your data is a really hard business right so you doing it as an individual is nigh on impossible you need an agent working for you because it's a complicated science right it involves data sides involves marketing involves partnerships with other people who might want to buy the data it involves application building I mean like who's gonna do that by themselves no one no one is a super human being to be able to do it for themselves so you need agents working for you and that's what daily audience gives we have interestingly some people out there policymakers who are interested in billing bringing in dedicated data nians legislation to really enable this and I think that's what makes it fascinating anyway look I hope that answered your question he's not his thing he's talking to his partner okay all right thank you very much I should get off the stage right yes all right great thank you very much for having me I really enjoyed [Music] 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