Towards User-centric Markets in High-assurance Data
By guest author Ivan Mortimer Schutts
If Data is the lifeblood of the economy and our lives, why are we still not in charge of it ourselves? Dataswyft has animated a discussion on how to enable the free flow of data in the world at a time when concerns about AI, fraud, politics and privacy are expanding the scope and sophistication of data restrictions and regulations. Earlier this year, the Japan FinTech Festival hosted a roundtable to take stock of how the G7 Data Free-Flow with Trust (DFFT) initiative – championed by the Japanese government – is progressing. The agenda is now moving into implementation under the leadership of Clarisse Girot at the OECD.
The DFFT agenda recognizes the basic as well as future challenges we need to address. At the outset we face a seemingly banal hurdle just to identify and keep track of regulations, let alone figure out how to comply with them. There exists a thicket of data-related regulations on privacy, competition, trade, finance and data protection through which we need to find our way. Law and regulation also increasingly need to be codified and be computational if we are to benefit from them, yet responsibly manage the growing use of AI. These tools must be able to draw upon vast pools of interoperable data – but they also need to be trusted and controlled. We need more nuanced ways of defining the myriad relationships we have with data. Web2 platforms capture and keep most of the benefits and revenues (as much as 99%) derived from data published by consumers across the world. User-centric systems are needed, not only to address impediments to cross-border data flow, but also to empower a broader cross-section of geographies, consumers and businesses with more social and economic control over their data.
On the road to equipping legal and natural persons with more autonomy over their data, we still have economic and governance problems to solve. The Japan FinTech Festival roundtable and this paper published by Elevandi take stock of some of those challenges we are working on.
Dataswyft is part of this journey. Today, it is building markets and data-sharing schemes for individuals to embrace identity and data ownership in low-risk, low-assurance environments where hurdles to adoption are low. With consumer adoption on one side, Dataswyft can channel network effects to deploy into other parts of the multi-sided market. This includes high-value, high-assurance data use cases in business, trade, finance and the green economy that face higher hurdles to adoption and require appropriate governance arrangements for the future of the digital economy.
Stay tuned for updates on this journey, coming soon from the follow-ups in Zurich at the Point Zero Forum and towards the Singapore Fintech Festival in Nov 2024.
Ivan Mortimer Schutts is Dataswyft’s Policy Advisor and a Specialist in the HATLAB Studio where distributed data ecosystem projects are incubated.
This post is a summary of the report from the Japan Fintech Festival published by Elevandi. For full report, click on the image below.
