Professor Olinga Taeed PhD FIoD *
Director, Centre of Citizenship, Enterprise and GovernanceCouncil Member and Expert Advisor, Chinese Ministry of Commerce ‘China
E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’
This personal data thing, it’s just not working. Some claim that
corporates want our data so they can sell stuff to us and governments want our
data to control us. But companies retort that if you expect your commercial product
to be free, and help create their jobs, economy and services to society, they
must be allowed to get to know you to help (others) target you better. Like
Google and their gmail, Facebook and their WhatsApp, bankers will tell you that
free banking forced them to develop other more convoluted instruments that
eventually ruined the world in 2008. Similarly, Sovereign States have a
responsibility to protect their population and encourage positive social
structures – so they see no problem with tracking our movements, rewarding good
behaviours and identifying bad actors. Faced with 1.4 billion population, China
openly uses a social credit system and defies ‘Land of the Free’ western
ideology that hails individual rights preferring to protect the corpus not the
few.
We have become obsessed with our personal data which is in the middle of
this battleground but let’s face it, GDPR has failed – nothing has changed
except we inanely press more cookie policy buttons and new T&C’s daily. We
are happy to be in a selfless open and more sharing society, believe in open
data, open source, open banking, but don’t see the incongruency with the rather
self centred #MyDataMyWay. Things are set to become even more selfcentric - in
blockchain we want to track your data to reward ourselves and to withhold our
data if we’re not. Last month I sat in Shanghai whilst an entrepreneur pitched
me with a system to token reward contributors of their medical data to resolve
long term illness. STOP – what? So you would rather people die than share your
data which is of no value to you whatsoever? Even if no remedy was found, your
data would have helped create jobs and bring income to their families. So why
have we become so possessive with our data and isn’t it misaligned to the open sharing
world we are trying to create?
I think the issue is that we mistakenly think of data as a tangible hard
asset like money, gold, land … things we can lose and others gain. Actually
it’s not – data shows all the hallmarks of an intangible asset, a subject which
I have studied for over a decade. Like all intangible non-financial assets,
data value is dependent on the holder; you can’t spend it at Starbucks but it
can be invaluable in the hands of others. Data transactions are directional – I
love you doesn’t mean you love me. Indeed like love, happiness and hope, it is
infinitesimally replenishable - you create more data tomorrow – you haven’t
lost the asset by giving it. Afterall we
don’t stop smiling at a beggar because we think they’ve taken something from
us? By smiling we have given them information about ouirselves – we have told
them something about how we feel, the Holy Grail of personal data. We are happy
to share with others on social media all about us, our inner beliefs, our core
values, and then we’re upset that companies, governments, and others use it to
understand or manipulate more efficiently? Doesn’t that happen every day with
colleagues, friends, family when we share ourselves with them? What is it that
we have lost?
If the dollar is the currency of financial value, I have wanted to know
what is the currency of non-financial value. For years I promoted sentiment as
the new currency of the millennium but in reality it has become impossible with
current technology to come to a consensus on how to measure it. And if you
can’t measure, you can’t bill it so all attempts to improve the world based on
impact have hitherto failed. In the UK Social Value 2012, UK Slavery Act 2015,
2% CSR Laws in India, Indonesia and Mauritius, most United Nations MDG (and now
SDG) initiatives, etc … the world is no better place; data is manipulated to be
compliant, with honesty, integrity and compassion the ultimate loser. Data,
however, is indeed universally measurable and thus a much better proxy to our
intentions. What if we dispense with the misnomer that we can hold back the
personal data ocean, and focus on the data transaction. I would be happy for my
data to be used by governments, by corporates, by anyone if in exchange they
agree to donate their upside (profits, tax, revenues, whatever) to civil
society and undertake not to harm anyone in the process, including myself. To
do this we would need an immutable ledger to track the use of our data – to
tokenise not for personal gain but for societal gain. If you don’t want to
surrender your information (which you cannot use in any case) then that is also
fine … but don’t expect to receive the upside from the public and private
interventions. Only blockchain can do this and provide the transparency for
challenges.
A key differentiator of non-financial transaction is the basis on a
social contract – eg in a relationship “you can have my love IF you make me
happy, do not harm me or my children” – what we would call a smart contract
with social dependencies. Intellectual Property, another intangible, has
developed systems like Creative Commons which depend on simple attributes to
safeguard the use; something very similar could be developed for our data.
Permission to use our data, like a donor card, can be tokenized and withdrawn
retrospectively demonstrating our alignment to corporate policy or government
strategy, something we define as a Microshare Token. Making data consumption
measurable, whether by corporates, governments
or NGO’s makes the impact actionable.
So in straight forward terms, what am I saying? Here
is my data, please use it to get to know me. Try not to harm me ... and
if you promise to use it for good, then I trust you with my data, my
thoughts, my life, my hopes and my ambitions. I don’t wish to build a Mexican
Wall of my life to repel all those seeking to know me whether for good or
not. It's not my data, I will share it
with you freely as I share my love, my happiness and my thoughts. Because I
share it doesn't mean I've lost it – I have new data tomorrow representing the
new me. It is ever lasting, tomorrow I will generate more love, more happiness
and more data. It does not belong to me, I give my IP to you freely to make the
world better. Yes you made money by knowing me, or knowing me will make me more
vulnerable to political influence. I'm happy for you. I hope it makes the world
a better place. So don't pay me, pay society... give them the money you would
have given me for my data to others who need it. That is why data and
blockchain are a perfect mixture. It's a trustless system where we can share
our data, transparently track it, contributing to a decentralized collective responsibility
to be distributed to whoever needs it.
So let us put our data
on the blockchain, not always insist on payment or recognition, but whomsoever
uses the big data agrees by the principles of honesty, integrity, and respect
of all those who put it there. And on our behalf, they agree to pay a
percentage of the value they create from it to others ... a social tax, a CSR,
... and this we can track ... through the blockchain, and permissioned through
a token. Then it is a matter of compliance and not of ownership of our data. Companies
decide which charities they pay, say 19% of their profits, and governments can
give us 19% tax relief for using our data. Will this work and does anyone
care? A straw poll of my children has swayed from my daughter Tigris’s
condemnation of what I’m proposing, to my son Vien and spouse Elizabeth who use
data to make their life seamless so find data intrusion of benefit in specific
situations, to my partner’s daughter Alayna ambivalence “I don’t really care”.
A blockchain data system could accommodate these broad spectrum of views.
* Opinions in this article are strictly my own. Art work by Tigris Ta’eed
