Data withdrawals – Silverton Consulting

AWS Data Exchange vs Data Banks – part 2

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud services, Cognitive computing, Data, data access, Data banks, Data economy, Data ownership, Data withdrawals, Deep Learning, Information economy, Initial Data Offerings (IDOs), Machine Learning, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points

Saw where AWS announced a new Data Exchange service on their AWS Pi day 2023. This is a completely managed service available on the AWS market place to monetize data.

In a prior post on a topic I called data banks (Data banks, data deposits & data withdrawals…), I talked about the need to have some sort of automated support for personal data that would allow us to monetize it.

The hope then (4.5yrs ago) was that social media, search and other web services would supply all the data they have on us back to us and we could then sell it to others that wanted to use it.

In that post, I called the data the social media gave back to us data deposits, the place where that data was held and sold a data bank, and the sale of that data a data withdrawal. (I know talking about banks deposits and withdrawals is probably not a great idea right now but this was back a ways).

AWS Data Exchange

1918 Farm Auction by dok1 (cc) (from Flickr)

With AWS Data Exchange, data owners can sell their data to data consumers. And it’s a completely AWS managed service. One presumably creates an S3 bucket with the data you want to sell. determine a price to sell the data for and a period clients can access that data for and register this with AWS and the AWS Data Exchange will support any number of clients purchasing data data.

Presumably, (although unstated in the service announcement), you’d be required to update and curate the data to insure it’s correct and current but other than that once the data is on S3 and the offer is in place you could just sit back and take the cash coming in.

I see the AWS Data Exchange service as a step on the path of data monetization for anyone. Yes it’s got to be on S3, and yes it’s via AWS marketplace, which means that AWS gets a cut off any sale, but it’s certainly a step towards a more free-er data marketplace.

Changes I would like to AWS Data Exchange service

Putting aside the need to have more than just AWS offer such a service, and I heartedly request that all cloud service providers make a data exchange or something similar as a fully supported offering of their respective storage services. This is not quite the complete data economy or ecosystem that I had envisioned in September of 2018.

If we just focus on the use (data withdrawal) side of a data economy, which is the main thing AWS data exchange seems to supports, there’s quite a few missing features IMHO,

Data use restrictions – We don’t want customers to obtain a copy of our data. We would very much like to restrict them to reading it and having plain text access to the data only during the period they have paid to access it. Once that period expires all copies of data needs to be destroyed programmatically, cryptographically or in some other permanent/verifiable fashion. This can’t be done through just license restrictions. Which seems to be the AWS Data Exchanges current approach. Not sure what a viable alternative might be but some sort of time-dependent or temporal encryption key that could be expired would be one step but customers would need to install some sort of data exchange service on their servers using the data that would support encryption access/use.
Data traceability – Yes, clients who purchase access should have access to the data for whatever they want to use it for. But there should be some way to trace where our data ended up or was used for. If it’s to help train a NN, then I would like to see some sort of provenance or certificate applied to that NN, in a standardized structure, to indicate that it made use of our data as part of its training. Similarly, if it’s part of an online display tool somewhere in the footnotes of the UI would be a data origins certificate list which would have some way to point back to our data as the source of the information presented. Ditto for any application that made use of the data. AWS Data Exchange does nothing to support this. In reality something like this would need standards bodies to create certificates and additional structures for NN, standard application packages, online services etc. that would retain and provide proof of data origins via certificates.
Data locality – there are some juristictions around the world which restrict where data generated within their boundaries can be sent, processed or used. I take it that AWS Data Exchange deals with these restrictions by either not offering data under jurisdictional restrictions for sale outside governmental boundaries or gating purchase of the data outside valid jurisdictions. But given VPNs and similar services, this seems to be less effective. If there’s some sort of temporal key encryption service to make use of our data then its would seem reasonable to add some sort of regional key encryption addition to it.
Data audibility – there needs to be some way to insure that our data is not used outside the organizations that have actually paid for it. And that if there’s some sort of data certificate saying that the application or service that used the data has access to that data, that this mechanism is mandated to be used, supported, and validated. In reality, something like this would need a whole re-thinking of how data is used in society. Financial auditing took centuries to take hold and become an effective (sometimes?) tool to monitor against financial abuse. Data auditing would need many of the same sorts of functionality, i.e. Certified Data Auditors, Data Accounting Standards Board (DASB) which defines standardized reports as to how an entity is supposed to track and report on data usage, governmental regulations which requires public (and private?) companies to report on the origins of the data they use on a yearly/quarterly basis, etc.

Probably much more that could be added here but this should suffice for now.

other changes to AWS Data Exchange processes

The AWS Pi Day 2023 announcement didn’t really describe the supplier end of how the service works. How one registers a bucket for sale was not described. I’d certainly want some sort of stenography service to tag the data being sold with the identity of those who purchased it. That way there might be some possibility to tracking who released any data exchange data into the wild.

Also, how the data exchange data access is billed for seems a bit archaic. As far as I can determine one gets unlimited access to data for some defined period (N months) for some specific amount ($s). And once that period expires, customers have to pay up or cease accessing the S3 data. I’d prefer to see at least a GB/month sort of cost structure that way if a customer copies all the data they pay for that privilege and if they want to reread the data multiple times they get to pay for that data access. Presumably this would require some sort of solution to the data use restrictions above to enforce.

Data banks, deposits, withdrawals and Initial Data Offerings (IDOs)

The earlier post talks about an expanded data ecosystem or economy. And I won’t revisit all that here but one thing that I believe may be worth re-examining is Initial Data Offerings or IDOs.

As described in the earlier post, IDO’ss was a mechanism for data users to request permanent access to our data but in exchange instead of supplying it for a one time fee, they would offer data equity in the service.

Not unlike VC, each data provider would be supplied some % (data?) ownership in the service and over time data ownership get’s diluted at further data raises but at some point when the service is profitable, data ownership units could be purchased outright, so that the service could exit it’s private data use stage and go public (data use).

Yeah, this all sounds complex, and AWS Data Exchange just sells data once and you have access to it for some period, establishing data usage rights.. But I think that in order to compensate users for their data there needs to be something like IDOs that provides data ownership shares in some service that can be transferred (sold) to others.

I didn’t flesh any of that out in the original post but I still think it’s the only way to truly compensate individuals (and corporations) for the (free) use of the data that web, AI and other systems are using to create their services.

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I wrote the older post in 2018 because I saw the potential for our data to be used by others to create/trlain services that generate lots of money for those organization but without any of our knowledge, outright consent and without compensating us for the data we have (indadvertenly or advertently) created over our life span.

As an example One can see how Getty Images is suing DALL-E 2 and others have had free use of their copyrighted materials to train their AI NN. If one looks underneath the covers of ChatGPT, many image processing/facial recognition services, and many other NN, much of the data used in training them was obtained by scrapping web pages that weren’t originally intended to supply this sorts of data to others.

For example, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that RayOnStorage posts text has been scrapped from the web and used to train some large language model like ChatGPT.

Do I receive any payment or ownership equity in any of these services – NO. I write these blog posts partially as a means of marketing my other consulting services but also because I have an abiding interest in the subject under discussion. I’m happy for humanity to read these and welcome comments on them by humans. But I’m not happy to have llm or other RNs use my text to train their models.

On the other hand, I’d gladly sell access to RayOnStorage posts text if they offered me a high but fair price for their use of it for some time period say one year… 🙂

Comments?

perspective by anomalous4 (cc) (from Flickr)

Data banks, data deposits & data withdrawals in the data economy – part 1

Posted on September 5, 2018March 13, 2023 by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Data, Data banks, Data deposits, Data economy, Data ownership, Data withdrawals, Initial Data Offerings (IDOs), Market dynamics, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary leadershp

Big data visualization, Facebook friend connections — Facebook friend carrousel by antjeverena (cc) (from flickr)

Read an interesting article this week in The Atlantic, Why Technology Favors Tyranny by Yuvai Noah Harari, about the inevitable future of technology and how the use of data will drive it.

At the end of the article Harari talks about the need to take back ownership of our data in order to gain some control over the tech giants that currently control our data.

In part 3, Harari discusses the coming AI revolution and the impact on humanity. Yes there will still be jobs, but early on less jobs for unskilled labor and over time less jobs for skilled labor.

Yet, our data continues to be valuable. AI neural net (NN) accuracy increases as a function of the amount of data used to train it. As a result, he who has the most data creates the best AI NN. This means our data has value and can be used over and over again to train other AI NNs. This all sounds like data is just another form of capital, at least for AI NN training.

If only we could own our data, then there would still be value from people’s (digital) exertions (labor), regardless of how much AI has taken over the reigns of production or reduced the need for human work.

What we need is data (savings) banks. These banks would hold people’s data, gathered from social media likes/dislikes, cell phone metadata, app/web history, search history, credit history, purchase history, photo/video streams, email streams, lab work, X-rays, wearables info, etc. Probably many more categories need to be identified but ultimately ALL the digital data we generate today would need to be owned by people and deposited in their digital bank accounts.

Data deposits?

Social media companies, telecom, search companies, financial services app companies, internet providers, etc. anywhere you do business should supply a copy of the digital data they gather for a person back to that persons data bank account.

There are many technical problems to overcome here but it could be as simple as an object storage bucket, assigned to each person that each digital business deposits (XML versions of) our digital data they create for everyone that uses their service. They would do this as compensation for using our data in their business activities.

How to change data ownership?

Today, we all sign user agreements which essentially gives a company the rights to our data in perpetuity. That needs to change. I see a few ways that this change could come about

Countries could enact laws to insure personal data ownership resides in the person generating it and enforce periodic distribution of this data
Market dynamics could impel data distribution, e.g. if some search firm supplied data to us, we would be more likely to use them.
Societal changes, as AI becomes more important to profit making activities and reduces the need for human work, and as data continues to be an important factor in AI success, data ownership becomes essential to retaining the value of human labor in society.

Probably, all of the above and maybe more would be required to change the ownership structure of data.

How to profit from data?

Technical entities needing data to train AI NNs could solicit data contributions through an Initial Data Offering (IDO). IDO’s would specify types of data required and a proportion of AI NN ownership, they would cede to all data providers. Data providers would be apportioned ownership based on the % identified and the number of IDO data subscribers.

Data banks would extract the data requested by the IDO and supply it to the IDO entity for use. For IDOs, just like ICO’s or IPO’s, some would fail and others would succeed. But the data used in them would represent an ownership share sort of like a stock (data) certificate in the AI NN.

Data bank responsibilities

Data banks would have various responsibilities and would need to collect fees to perform them. For example, data banks would be responsible for:

Protecting data deposits – to insure data deposits are never lost, are never accessed without permission, are always trackable as to how they are used..
Performing data deposits – to verify that data is deposited from proper digital entities, to validate that data deposits are in a usable form and to properly store the data in a customers object storage bucket.
Performing data withdrawals – upon customer request, to extract all the appropriate data requested by an IDO, anonymize it, secure it, package it and send it to the IDO originator.
Reconciling data accounts – to track data transactions, data banks would supply a monthly statement that identifies all data deposits and data withdrawals, data revenues and data expenses/fees.
Enforcing data withdrawal types – to enforce data withdrawal types, as data withdrawals can have many different characteristics, such as exclusivity, expiration, geographic bounds, etc. Data banks would need to enforce withdrawal characteristics, at least to the extent they can
Auditing data transactions – to insure that data is used properly, a consortium of data banks or possibly data accountancies would need to audit AI training data sets to verify that only data that has been properly withdrawn is used in trying the NN. .

AI NN, tools and framework responsibilities

In order for personal data ownership to work well, AI NNs, tools and frameworks used today would need to change to account for data ownership.

Generate, maintain and supply immutable data ownership digests – data ownership digests would be a sort of stock registry for the data used in training the AI NN. They would need to be a part of any AI NN and be viewable by proper data authorities
Track data use – any and all data used in AI NN training should be traceable so that proper data ownership can be guaranteed.
Identify AI NN revenues – NN revenues would need to be isolated, identified and accounted for so that data owners could be rewarded.
Identify AI NN data expenses – NN data costs would need to somehow be isolated, identified and accounted for so that data expenses could be properly deducted from data owner awards. .

At some point there’s a need for almost a data profit and loss statement as well as a data balance sheet for at an AI NN level. The information supplied above should make auditing data ownership, use and rewards much more feasible. But it all starts with identifying data ownership and the data used in training the AI.

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There are a thousand more questions that come to mind. For example

Who owns earth sensing satellite, IoT sensors, weather sensors, car sensors etc. data? Everyone in the world (or country) being monitored is laboring to create the environment sensed by these devices. Shouldn’t this sensor data be apportioned to the people of the world or country where these sensors operate.
Who pays data bank fees? The generators/extractors of the data could pay in addition to providing data deposits for the privilege to use our data. I could also see the people paying. Having the company pay would give them an incentive to make the data load be as efficient and complete as possible. Having the people pay would induce them to use their data more productively.
What’s a decent data expiration period? Given application time frames these days, 7-15 years would make sense. But what happens to the AI NN when data expires. Some way would need to be created to extract data from a NN, or the AI NN would need to cease being used and a new one would need to be created with new data.
Can data deposits be rented/sold to data aggregators? Sort of like a AI VC partnership only using data deposits rather than money to fund AI startups.
What happens to data deposits when a person dies? Can one inherit a data deposits, would a data deposit inheritance be taxable as part of an estate transfer?

In the end, as data is required to train better AI, ownership of our data makes us all be capitalist (datalists) in the creation of new AI NNs and the subsequent advancement of society. And that’s a good thing.

Comments?