Is blockchain going to change how companies use data?

Well…. yes and no. Companies are hoovering up data at an increasing pace. Many of them have decided that in order to run machine learning programs, more data is always better, but these data lakes create a lot of technical risk for them. And now that technical risk is creating legal, regulatory and monetary risk as well.

It’s also becoming harder and harder for smaller companies to compete with larger companies within their industry vertical. Increasingly, juggernauts like Google are amassing so much industry specific data that they can credibly compete with the best in class in every industry. Companies are realizing that they’re going to need to collaborate in order to derive the business insights that help them compete.

Federation and decentralization applied to data science isn’t about governance or tokenizing things on a blockchain — again, please, don’t put all your data on a blockchain! Rather, we’re talking about being able to build and run algorithms in new ways that can cross trust boundaries while also being more privacy preserving. That’s really exciting and is going to unlock a ton of value trapped up in today’s data silos.

You’ve been discussing surveillance capitalism a lot recently — is the dystopian panopticon smartchip an inevitability?

The genie is out of the bottle. I don’t think people want to become off the grid hermits or give up their smart devices, but we can create new types of products that are more transparent and respectful of how data is being used.

You cannot prevent your telco from having your phone’s location information — connecting to cell towers is how the service functions. Lots of people that seem really focused on “privacy tech” these days need to understand the difference between what is private (free from intrusion) and what is confidential (authorized access, with expectation of consensual use). I am okay with vendors having the data that is created as I use their service, but I’m not necessarily okay with them selling it to a hedge fund or ad-tech company.

For most apps we use, there’s no reason why your data has to be offloaded and stored perpetually. Those are business choices, and venture capital funding and corporate profit models incentivize acting at cross-purposes to your own customers. We should fix the incentives, because regulation moves too slow and often gets it wrong.