By Irene Ng
It was autumn 2011 and I have just started my job at the University of Warwick although living in Cambridge. My academic work in service systems was starting to be applied into the digital economy and IoT so digital systems were already on my mind. I was in the middle of Cambridge thinking about lunch when I asked myself:
What kind of company would know so much about me that can give me a great recommendation for lunch?
That seemingly innocuous question underpinned quite a wicked problem. The company would have to know that I am
Sensitive to dairy,
Do not like potatoes,
Love Thai and Vietnamese food
Love cocktails and red wine
In Cambridge in front of Kings College
Have an appointment in an hour
Irene loves Vietnamese and Thai Food
That’s a lot of very personal information about me! As I pondered on it further, I realised that I was looking at a possible market failure. By the time any company can get even up to 50% of that information, either I would be so uneasy that I wouldn’t give anymore information or the regulator would step in to do something about the market power of that company.
At this point, I was thinking:
Am I never getting a recommendation then?
So started the journey of trying to fix the potential market failure problem I saw back in 2011.
Some people think that the reason I created the HAT Microserver (the self sovereign data server) was altruistic. Perhaps. For me, altruistic outcomes can be brought about by well designed markets. Giving data ownership is not only the right thing to do but it would also create better functioning markets that would be driven by consumers - that consumers have the right to reward and punish firms through their choices and a fundamental choice they must have is the power they have from the use of their data, and the ability to wield it.
So together with 6 other Professors, we applied for a £1.2m grant to do the research. I thought the problem then was technology, and we just needed to build something that would give access and control over data. Within 6 months of the grant, I realised to my horror, that the problem was worse that that. Data was bit strings of 1s and 0s that are not “ownable” and individuals do not have any capability to own (ie owning IP rights) because it was technologically not possible to have that capability without a service provider. So that’s why Facebook, Apple, Google became our proxies to do everything. We couldn’t legally do anything on our own except to sign and scribble on a document. From a market design perspective, that was a monumental problem. If consumers couldn’t own data rights directly, no market can be formed around data.
This then became the journey to create a new class of data - the self-sovereign data - that markets could form around, and that got us here today which you can see in the History and in Historical Media
