Monetizing Browsing Data with Swash

Transcript

okay all right hi my name is Shiv Malik I'm actually I'm really incredibly psyched to be here at CC I was here last year I think I was here the year before it gets more fun every time and I love this building because it's really associated with Mutual's I think the association of international Mutual's who sort of founded here in 1950 and and that's what she related to the talk so you'll see there's some congruence between what I'm talking about and then this building which I presume was like done on purpose because the theorems a bit of a mutual

yes he's nodding there we go okay all right so on that note incidentally I'm gonna just change the title the talk can you talk I'm going for how to monetize your data with the data Union I am going to talk about swash if anyone was waiting particularly to hear about swash you will hear about it but really I'm going to take how much higher level conceptual thing do a much more high level conceptual talk because I had a bit more time just the kind of thing you're waiting for huh yes no okay okay right

so here's how I'm going to struck this talk one who am I to the state were in now with the data economy three why the date why data ownership is I'm going to argue the only root out of all of this huge mess this hell that we live in when it comes to the data economy a four wire data ownership future is an infrastructural nightmare it really is I've lived it those guys over there I've lived it it's hell five has some clever people over there solved it six I'm gonna show you a demo a working example of a data union with a thousand members already it's like almost the biggest app I know that's a really low bar but like that's cool that's the swashb it seven two people

who want to sell their data it's like do they we found out they oh just ruined that Bell to talk eight advantage of the data Union nine we're next and then audience questions but he'll probably cut me off audience question so I'm really sorry who am i right okay so my name is Shiv Malik I'm gonna former investigative journalist for The Guardian of all things turned data or evangelist for a better data economy this is me in 2012 and they invited me on the news because I deleted my facebook account like back then it was so rare they're like you got on the news if you did you Facebook okay and I did

it in protest because I was pissed off at Facebook's IPO and I think you know what I said to the usually there's like look we're all in post laves and this is disgusting and I'm sorry I'm gonna delete my account and the news reader guy call Krishnan guru-murthy is still on than host channel 4 news back in the UK he said look you've lost this like you've lost what are you talking about chef like you know hundreds of millions of people use Facebook you've lost the argument on privacy so I was like super disheartened by this but I thought look if you are gonna get back the only way to get back is to fight Tech with tech ok so fast-forward to 2017 and I joined a group of developers that made up the open-source project called streamer we were here last year Henry was talking

our founder we've got a couple of talks tomorrow and they ended up building some underlying tech or infrastructure as a sort of almost side project which I think changes the data economy forever it's pretty mind-blowing you're gonna see that in a second what they've done is to make a thing called the data union possible I don't know if anyone knows glen while he's pretty active on the quadratic yeah guy nodding his head good and Jaron Lonnie a who if you haven't read his book but they work together on occasion actually they work in Microsoft Research together but if you haven't read Jaron Lanier is book who owns the

future please do it's brilliant I'm very inspiring I'm very poetic if you can be poetic about tech jaron lanier certainly is your man um and I think they would call they had this vision of what they called a mid a mediator of individual data which is a mouthful so no one uses that but I think we call them what we do call them data unions so there's sort of congruent so if you know that idea of a bid this is what it is but what is it stop dancing around chef's tell them what it is it's a way of crowd sourcing data and allowing people to work in essence as a collective to sell it right it's a bit like a credit union in that sense you

crowdsource your assets to the benefits of the membership so in the same way a data union is a bit like that right enable and it's perhaps I would say the only way to enable individuals to own the most important asset own and control the most important asset of the 21st century and that is information okay so the state we're in you guys probably know all of this so I'm gonna skip over this bit somewhat hurriedly look okay so there's like three visions for a better data economy right out there at the moment the first one is the open data idea right and that's put forward by the ODI that's Tim berners-lee's think-tank

which he started about seven years ago and the idea is this it's like lurk all data should be open and unsilent I company x' and governments alike should be you know putting their data into a data Commons and everyone can benefit and everyone's happy and lovely you know everything's wonderful and fine the second thing is and most of you will belong to this group right the privacy yes the privacy or death hands up if your privacy or death one guy two three yes no you don't believe in privacy you know privacy or death okay he says I don't want to die for it fine okay so that's the second vision right and the notion is obviously look we do in fact silo our data we keep it away from

everyone else and we keep the stuff that personal identifiers to us right usually are stored in our actual computer not on a cloud for example and and it's had actually lots of successes the Oh dia has had some successes the open data movement has had six investors with open banking privacy movement had even more successes in a sense with the tech that they've created browsers such as one could argue Firefox dr. go as a search engine and then there's various encrypted apps one could even put forward I mean statuses obviously there's there's a hundred in the theorem community to go around for everyone but also more mainstream or massively more mainstream you could say

telegram and whatsapp belong in that bracket to let's not go in too deep on that one and then the final one is like ownership model right the ownership model and what does it say it says okay look you know that if you want the property paradigm it's much better suited to getting at privacy I'll elaborate that shortly and openness right so if you can own individuals can own and control the data that they create they're much better enable to in a sense stop it from being transferred that's privacy in a sense or trade it that's openness and so you're going to fulfill both those goals right and the

and the notion of ownership that I certainly subscribe to is not like here's a piece of wood I sell you the word you take the word you build a house and whatever right and then I don't own that word anymore it's one of authorship right so I alter this data I license it to you write this stuff is sounds desperately complicated but it's really not happens with books if you ever written a book or a piece of creative content you'll know that you can license that at will and you still retain moral rights over these things for example so it's not just about selling it like that and it's gone it's gone forever right so there are complicated notions of ownership it's not simply as I say I own it now I don't [Music]

and the people backing it actually a weird group of people right so it's not organized as no think tanks there's no big like tech out as we'll see Andrew yang he's now quit as Democratic potential Democratic presidential contender but he was a big proponent of this you've al-hariri will.i.am the musician and as I mentioned Jaron Lanier and while fit into that taxonomy so it's just bunch of people and as it's a worst of all there's no implementations right it's a bunch of dead projects or sort of site scams that say well give you control of your data but there's nothing really that right what's that you know what that is

and you know what that is yes you said that that guy this guy's answering he's like rocking it like you guys just I need this guy's an audience he's brilliant it is the panopticon right famously experiment by Jeremy Bentham an English philosopher from the 19th century could be the 18th century after Karen how hoops and he's like here's how you design a prison right and it's also really good metaphor for the data economy right so you have a world of dead oligarchs and data serfs write the data oligarchs sit in the middle who uses the internet who uses the internet in this room everyone should have their

hands are good see everyone put the ends up good ok well that's you oh my god I screwed up for you how did I happen to our point you guys already know this so I'm gonna skip over this but like you know the government NSA Snowden revelations was in The Guardian at the time when they revealed that and it was an amazing story which I think we're still living with the repercussions today we know that the government is also a major stakeholder in this set up above so you can't really trust the stay or big tech and obviously then we have in this model issues huge issues of equity in terms of wealth distribution

the impacts on privacy innovation and the economics more generally so this sucks this is a panopticon hell that we live in right okay part three potato ownership right better than open or private okay so given where we are I think it's safe to argue that the open data and privacy visions have failed they fail they're just just ejek lis strategically they have failed and the results in the sensors speak for themselves but let me elaborate on why I think they failed okay the open data movement its central demand right is that the state enact laws to get data like the data giant's

data by maths to give up their private property right share it share it just share it with everyone else for free but they're kind of as I spent and before they're failing to recognize that like the state and big tech are on the same side they're completely aligned they're not opposed so you're not really going to get that regulation and like you don't expect the kind of and they say oh the government to say yeah sure like we'll get the people that we use to collect our information to also share it with everyone else because they lose power now you don't have to believe in that argument fine you can go to the next argument which is to say okay fine the government does step in and say like will regulate big tech but they can't

even get them to pay tax right well regulate big tech to open up their data and the open data movement but they can't even get them to pay tax right why because Big Tex really very powerful and lobbying and we know this we know this humming them again and we don't really want to be disappointed by there anymore so I think it's just a giant failure it also may ensures the whole open data movement is set up to ensure that power remains between either government or big tech and it stays up there at the top and a very small group of people and that isn't sustainable and in fact notably Tim berners-lee who set up the ODI has himself given up on the vision and started something else around data ownership called solid privacy

sorry guys privacy's dead the privacy movement has failed that's what I'd like to argue right now I was a privacy I'm a privacy warrior right you're a privacy warrior we're in this together but I think you have to make this argument right at this point in time we're losing souls all the time every single day right what is that that's the Amazon speaker that's far out trumped anything that's been built in this community and we'll continue to do so in fact people are basically are paying Jeff Bezos they're paying job please spy on me please spy on me they know that they're being spied on but they want to be spied

on it seems right it's crazy it's crazy and the reason for that is is the cognitive load like of enacting real privacy right real private is not just using like the one app at a time like you know how deep this goes right you move anywhere like you own your car in three years time it'll tell you it'll tell who the car owner everything about you right there was a guy who was a murderer Court good thing because his he destroyed the car but the on-board computer survived and it could tell the police everything about which door had been open exactly when and where and how and exactly you know that's happening all the time right so you can't just use the one app and say oh now it's all

finite you status like it's cool no that doesn't give you privacy right your app might be successful but that's not fulfilling the bigger picture so the cognitive overload of trying to live in that privacy world is when set against the constant temptation of convenience is a battle that's just been lost and will be kept keep getting the last time and time again like convenience and by convenience I mean like I need to walk into a shop and buy some stuff right oh god I have to give them all my previous financial history basically right how can I escape that okay so the aims are right but the strategy has failed okay so what does data ownership offer one

it's a better meme right it's a really better me like it's a great meme people get it right people get it from when they're like to like that expression taking candy from a baby it's really hard to take candy from a baby right why because toddlers understand poverty right so like no this is my candy get off so people really understand it as a meme it's very simple it's imbued right from the beginning so that's good too better distribution of power right unlike in a sense the open data movement and the ideals of that the notion of ownership rights situation at the individual level right not at the governmental level we are not asking

other people to do things for us we're saying this is mine I own it it's it's it's with me and I'm the agent involved in this process and that's why really I'm attracted to it and why everyone else in this room should be attracted to it three distribution of wealth right privacy doesn't give you wealth doesn't take the wealth away in many senses from from from much larger companies notice the open data movement but owning your data and therefore being able to lease it licensure sallet that does that starts to affect the data economy in a much larger way and actually for I would argue that it gives a much much better

defense against privacy intrusion why is that well maybe it's not so obvious but privacy is being trampled not because people are giving up on privacy right not because people are giving up on privacy but because giant companies are taking people's data so privacy it's just like it's really that simple okay I'll just repeat it again privacy is being trampled not because people are giving up on privacy but because giant companies are taking the information so the obvious thing response is well actually but not the way we've gone to be kind of blamed the victim a bit not in many senses I've just done it just now in this talk how can we better stop companies from taking this information

and the current privacy argument is drawn around our kind of human rights frame right you're like hey look I have an inalienable right to privacy well here's a much better way it's my property and you can take it right and that's why this picture is up there that's a one of the oldest cases in English law was a guy called ntek vs. Carrington the King's messengers basically came along and took this guy's papers and he says you're a propagandist we don't like you we're going to take your stuff and the court said no hang on you can't just go into someone's house and take people's stuff why not because you have an annual rights of human rights and then let's look at the you know human rights framework for all of this no and actually those thoughts were around at the time so it's not inconceivable that

was the case they said no it's your stuff it's just your stuff and the King we don't care who the King is unless he's got an actual law saying he can take people's stuff you can't take your stuff right very simple car come into my house because I own it you can't come into my land without a warrant because it's my I can't take my data without my permission because it's my right I think that's a lot a lot stronger argument in law as well as a meme then the current privacy framework okay there's a problem though

which is that thing about that tech output right not much tech output on the data ownership front right why turns out it's a nightmare to build the infrastructure necessary okay I'll tell you another story this is a document written by a guy called Chris downs Chris downs was an English guy who in 2000 became the first person to sell their data on the Internet the World Wide Web I say download download because I actually had to handwrite most of this

information because it came from various websites obviously Facebook wasn't around then and I think he went to the experience of the day maybe it was Experian and he kind of wrote stuff down and went to his bank and I said can I had this information and then he put it all in a thumb drive and where did he sell it he sold it on eBay because that was the only place to sell it and you know how much you got for it Jonathan you came to my talk you should remember he got $200 for it actually three hundred and sixty dollars I think I worked out in like today's prices that's not bad right it's not bad but as Chris down said in a piece in 2017 like we're

still stuck in this thing right when it comes to like individuals owning the data and somehow selling it like licensing yeah we're still stuck with this same shitty infrastructure right like I go around to all the websites I download it I put it on a zip drive and I stick it on eBay like what else are you gonna do right so let's break down the elements and kind of what's need it on this infrastructure back-end one transport right you need a way of moving and pushing the data from one place to another I'm just going to leave that there because I think that's fairly obvious right you need a back-end network for doing that people have AWS as a solution at the moment like what do individuals have that they can easily use and easily utilize or developers could easily utilize on their behalf right especially the one that's

decentralized not much going on that front to discovery they need to place pyres data buyer said none of this works unless people actually want to buy the data from you right otherwise it's just like put it out in the world that's a bit rubbish what's my incentive so you need buyers to like be able to come and buy the data and they're not going to negotiate with like a million Chris downs is on eBay are they so you need a marketplace and need a way of aggregating all that data into single data products right so it's two bits there you need to be able to discover it on a market place and a way to like purchase it in a sense and find out but also it needs to be aggregated and then the last bit is the payment right and that isn't easy you're

like hey chef we've got a theory and we've got like regular money if you really want to use that what's the issue here well if you like a data buyer comes along and spends $10,000 on updated product but there's a million members of that Union well then everyone's going to get what 10 cents each and you know how this works right it doesn't work at all even with ethereal it won't work it won't scale so we built I'm giving it away so you need a micro payments solution as well right hmm okay so back in network market place payments micro payments solution okay hi Jonathan you saw those guys over there they solved it I know there were a few other people so

weirdly we had this in our like white paper we didn't intend to build data unions but we had these bits in our white paper one was to build a decentralized peer-to-peer encrypted a real-time data delivery network right that was cool so that was already there the marketplace was already built as well and already had experience with aetherium some what and crypto economics we obviously created our own token for funding ourselves in 2017 so an ECR 20 token so we had some experience therefore with crypto and aetherium and we bought all those things together in

what we've called date unions framework for developers the last bit on micro payments was the solution that we call mono plasma which actually Henry was here at HCC last year talking about it and actually launching it there so this is a year on hey I'm going to give you quick back-end I'm not a developer as you've probably already realized so I'm going to give you a quick overview of the back end but embarrassingly nontechnical okay so how it works datasource comes in goes through the back-end Network right travels it travels to the buyer through a series of nodes when the buyer unlocks it and only

when the buyer unlocks it does that data then flow to the buyer the payment is served by a smart contract and goes back to the source so everyone's happy all right so that's the basic framework that's going on in the backend and that's the framework for daily use should be built should be out in a few months time so a team has been building a data union for the last year it's called swash and it's really the first data union in the world there are actually more coming along they're not part of streamer is actually based out of Turkey and they saw what we were doing about a year ago and they thought yeah hell this is cool we could make

some money out of it we like your ideals we like what you're doing so we're gonna start building so what is swash well it's just a browser plugin for Chrome Firefox edge anyone use edge now who would use edge I don't know embarrassing someone I did that at a conference not so long ago and someone from Microsoft was like yeah I use edge it's like I know that's sad for you so users send their data direct to the network right from their browser plug-in direct to the network through the network to the buyer and when the buyer purchases that then that smart Condor

then distributes the money out both to the users but then also to swash and swash is allowed to take according to smart contract up to 30% at this moment uses like yeah maybe maybe more did give me some sanity no it said 30 sounds good to you sir okay all right it's a bit more precise than that hopefully um I mean it's functioning right now so that's how these guys swash generate revenue so that gives them the incentive to say okay look well we could be selling millions people's personal data if they want to get in on this because they want to get paid great all right we'll build an app that allows us to deliver that data we're gonna see that in a second and we can get paid for that too right so it's a nice what is this like a cooperative

right it's a kind of data cooperative in many senses right with those constituent elements there okay look I don't know how I'm gonna do this but I'm supposed to be showing you now a demo but it's gonna have to be I don't have my meta mask on this thing that's why we wanted to use my computer so I'm not gonna be able to show you the whole thing but I will be able to show you the browser plugin very quickly okay how do I now get out of this can you give me a hand this is gonna be so immortalized on that live stream it's gonna be awful like this is where shares completely effed up can I use this mic as well you tell the

sound guy that I want to use the podium mic he's not gonna say hello can you just go down there afterwards that's fine I've got it I've got it Oh figure it out oh my god this could turn out to be far too difficult so look um this is why people rehearse right I'm

sorry okay leave it leave it okay I don't think I'm gonna be able to demo swosh can we go back to the slides okay thank you which is a real shame rats can you ask the guy to put the podium mic on okay but I can't see

oh I have to just do it like this oh my god the key foots and fret this is terrible okay it's fine it's gonna be the worst demo over can we tell you I just go back to the slides and we'll just leave it at that don't worry okay look can I recommend that we you all go to swash app dot IO it's a browser plug-in as I mentioned and it's beautiful they've really thought about privacy and how you can enact your privacy whilst also having the potential

to monetize that data so they've got a number of really interesting features like a data delay module so like you can see what's being sent and what's about to be sent and you can say you know what I want to delay that more or I will just want to delete those data items but the keyboard still in French now okay that's just rude okay here it is let's get add to Firefox okay so you can see this is okay yes we is okay

yes great okay look there we go we've installed it this is fun so this is the data data is token that streamer created back in 2017 so that's what you get paid in I'm gonna run over this really quickly how long have I got how long have I got 0 minutes no I had an hour surely I haven't already spoken for an hour okay if you open up the options you can see here oh my god here so when you open up you've got you can toggle on a few options here right about what you actually want to share with

this data union so do you want to share your Twitter data you're surfing data your Facebook and you can when you open up the Facebook example for example you can then drill down on more particular options right so this is like the permissioning element about like what what do you really want to share with the steady unit what are you comfortable with in a sense monetizing I want to show you the surfing example shortly so it goes to you know visited pages the visiting graph crepe bookmark let's leave that off let's say I'm not comfortable with that etc etc right then it also has a privacy slider which is really nice right so at the lowest level you're really giving away everything then you turn it to medium or let's just go straight to high

you can see so much more is masked including the time string which just tells you the year that is created not even the month the day and the time is masked itself again and the URL root is kept but nothing else right here's that data delay module that I was mentioning so let's just set it to 4 minutes right and go here and perform a search right on date okay let's see what comes up for there we can see all the results are up here right what does that data now look like well it's generating three data points out of that okay let's scroll down and you can see all of the links that were returned after that

search and they're ranking and this is obviously all machine readable so this is interesting because this is now going obviously to the data union now we've got a thousand members what I really wanted to show you at this point was how this data looks an aggregate but I can't do that because I this doesn't have meta masks installed but I can show you this which is okay so look this is from the data buyer side this is what it looks like so you go to our marketplace and you type in swash to find as a product you click on it and you sign in with a theorem right so if

you have a metal mask account you can also sign in by email but you sign in with a thermos it's a lot easier and you'd purchase it using data tokens and this is the sign-in process that we won't go into but once you purchase it from there then you can see the output of a thousand people and it's quite remarkable you really get an instinct for kind of like what people coming together means when it comes to monetizing data all right that was a very very quick overview of all of that somehow gone can you put it back into play function thank you so I'm going to take you very briefly

now through the rest of those brief arguments and the conclusions that come out of all of this my god this is way complicated thank you though I appreciate okay all right so look we did some research because we want to know look do people actually really want to sell their data

right because they don't want to sell the data then all of this was a giant waste of time one it turns out they do and it's really obviously that made us really happy we hadn't wasted a time amazing what money moves people people actually really like getting money for stuff it turns out how surprised surprised but also for their data so that's cool but as long as you don't do it in a scammy way which is you don't try and kind of create airmiles basically out of this so you need a tradable token and people can get then they're comfortable with crypto this is a really good finding for the crypto community in that sense right people are in fact like Millennials and younger are very comfortable with crypto they're like yeah we get it like even if they

don't know what a blockchain is even if they haven't handled crypto before they're like yeah we get it that's cool right as long as they can trade it though it's like it's not locked into that that's cool that's the first thing the second thing is yes people are willing to sell different types of data they're less comfortable with financial data they're more comfortable with say music streaming data right so there are degrees on the scale three and this is by the way product researcher we did with twenty people so it was qualitative rather than quantitative down in Brighton about three months ago we got a firm to do it so that they really looked at it what they were doing independently of us three if they liked the concept of a data union if they liked the concept of a data union they loved the reality

so when they get their hands on swash seven out of ten people go from I really like this idea to oh my god this is amazing why do they do that because they get control right they get a sense of control they want platforms to give them a sense of control in fact when people say that they don't care about privacy that's actually not true at all they really care about privacy it's all a defense mechanism they don't they tell you they don't care but they're lying because they don't want to face the reality that they don't have any sense of control right they don't actually have any control they have no way of enforcing that so they just go you know what I don't care but they care deeply and as soon as you give them a sense of control then they love you for it they

love you for it they love the platform they love the software and they want more that's cool that's all good that works certainly in our favor okay more advantages I'm gonna skip over this very briefly but this is really interesting firstly datasets are deemed monopolized once you start to take let's say location data and you create data sets that can output location data what are you gonna do right what's Google gonna do this is great right because what do they do right now when someone comes along and builds an app that has location data right like a map app what do they do they just buy it up right like they did with Waze right or you find it really impossible to compete well if you just

had the data set that you could just buy in of like 10 million people's location because all those people were willing to sell it as part of a data Union then you can just create an app on top right and it's easy as and suddenly you can compete with Google and what Google's going to knock all these people down I don't think so it's a lot harder now right and new business models can be created we've already done this like WWF needed data from fishermen right really poor artists and fishermen and they're the ones who fish the tuner out of the sea in the Philippines how do you get data from them right why would they care about your data collection they don't they don't care about it but if you give them some money in a data union suddenly they're like yeah ok this is worthwhile

I'll do it and that's what they're doing so you can imagine like another hundred ideas like this right ok we're next for daily unions now that I've got you to care about data unions ok very quickly how much of swashes data worth right per year like that stuff that i just showed you how much is it worth if you can scale it anyone I have a guess in revenues per year you doesn't know 30 million roughly 30 million in revenues a year right that's more than anyone else in making revenues because no one makes revenues really but that's a ton of money right already and that's just one idea it's just one idea and this is one

valuations actually if you can really scale it it's worth double that and maybe double again because no one else has that data that's why no one else can get that kind of that granularity on the data without asking for users permission and no one has found a way of doing that upfront and making it a trade and making it acceptable to use this right can it scale let's use a base yeah we think so I think next time I come here next year this will be the biggest at swash and I'm not part of the Smosh team so I can't vouch for that but I think by far it'll be the biggest step going because the propositions really simple will give you crypto right we'll give you crypto

rather than you have to kyc to get it yourself in some sense or use our service using crypto which is always a barrier okay more daily unions are coming including deadening douse we've already got that going that's fun and lastly the Legislative Windsor in our favourable very favorable towards daily unions gdpr has article 20 in it which is about portability so we can just take Netflix's data that's where we're going next right take Netflix's data they don't sell it to anyone else or hell if we all generate it why not take it why not take Spotify data right why not take Facebook's data it's all there right if you just work with users in this way

CCPA which is the new Californian GDP are it's not really but it's actually has even more powerful elements in there so you can tell companies now to stop selling your data right so imagine a data union that sends an automated email saying stop selling my data but also we want it right so we can take it and you can't sell it either hey that's now data unions have a monopoly on data sets that's cool that completely changes everything right we didn't ask for this legislation it's there already right we are asking for it now okay that's it questions do you have any questions I'm allowed questions how long have I got I what's the time yeah I mean you can

just have question here and I can do does anyone have any deliberate question they won't ask right now no you're like get off alright look thank you very much for that I enjoyed it I'm sorry about the technical glitches but I hope that was somewhat stimulating thanks a lot [Applause]