Self-Sovereign Data (“SSData”) is a legal class of data where the Intellectual Property of the data is owned by the data subject and the data can be legally untethered from the source (the data producer) so that the data subject can license the data on to others with the permission of the data subject only.
When data is self-sovereign, it means individuals and SMES own not just their private information such as income, age, identity etc but they can also own a digital form of their own behaviours such as financial and health behaviours. This can be revealed to businesses for benefits, creating market power. The vision is to create a “bottom-up” data economy that empower individuals and SMEs with their own self-sovereign data, and emerging a new set of services and businesses on the data that would create a better distributed economic growth than the current economy.
Self-Sovereign Data (“SSData”) is a Legal, Economic, Data and Technology innovation borne out of 10 years of work with 8 UK universities. For Dataswyft, SSData is data at rest within Decentralized Data Servers (DDS) or HAT Microservers databases, that is tagged based on a set of attributes. SSData is created either by an application that is directly connected to the servers and uses DDS storage as primary storage, or when a data producer (e.g. hospital, bank or retailer) synchronizes a copy of their centralized data to be “re-homed” by their customers in the DDS. “Rehoming” means the data becomes SSData and benefit from all its properties.
Discoverability
Since SSData are created through special connections (“pipes”) between applications and servers, these pipes can provide SSData attributes that can be discovered without revealing the actual content within the pipes, thus protecting the identity of the source and destination. The attributes can be used as audience attributes to personalise, recommend or target offers more effectively within a Dataswyft Wallet without compromising on privacy.
Verification
One valuable aspect of SSData is that it enables widespread use of verified producer’s data without a technical and legal relationship with the producer. The data can be synced between SSData and producers data on the server side and the data subject can verify their version with a data user. For example a producer that can verify age or income or do a KYC of a customer to enable its reuse by the customer with other businesses through a data terminal that merchants can sign up to within minutes. This enable verification credentials to be easily set up and scaled.
Sharing
SSData can be shared by the owner to fill in forms or shared with organisations whom the data subject trust.
Micro-behaviour coordination
Another use of SSData is for behavioral coordination. SSData can be about actual behaviour eg. being at a location, lost 3kg weight or shopped at supermarket X. As such, a set of SSData in a data wallet is a journey across multiple touchpoints. This makes it useful for the coordination of collective behaviours at scale. This is why SSData is often used in a data ecosystem for a collective mission or a purpose because such behaviors can be verified and large scale coordination is possible at lower costs. For example, SejutaKG uses an SSData Wallet to match brands and retailers with individuals to reward and incentivise healthier living with weight loss data/behaviors that can be verified.
Smart SSData.
SSData from multiple producers can also be computed privately with AI/ML algorithms “at the edge” to generate smart SSData to be used and shared in a data wallet.
SSData has special legal, economic, technology and data properties that enable legal persons (individuals or businesses) to store, use and share the data even if the original data was generated elsewhere. Dataswyft incentivises data producers to create a synchronized copy of their data as SSData and, using our infrastructure, use and share the data with partners in their ecosystem without the need for these partners to technically and legally integrate with the producers. By doing so, verified data from producers become portable, scalable and interoperable, while providing producers the ability for their audiences to be discoverable without leaking identity. SSData move between DDSs with flows enabled by contract on Dataswyft’s network without any visibility of its contents, enabling parties to have greater privacy. Access to the network to create and mobilize SSData is through a set of network services integrated with Dataswyft System APIs.
An SSData Ecosystem is a distribute data ecosystem created by an organization to coordinate their customers and partners around a shared mission or purpose that can be facilitated with data. It usually has a strong brand story, an enduring community culture and revenue generating through the use of a data wallet.
Once a Data Ecosystem is launched, it makes its money in 4 ways, enabled by a data wallet.