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
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… 🙂
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