Personal Data: The Emergence Of A New Asset Class

Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.” Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner, March 2009

Personal Data: The Emergence Of A New Asset Class

"Social media networks filter our news feeds in a way that they cannot decouple from their profit motivation. They owe it to their shareholders, and we "owe" it to them simply by going online and using their services" -Dor Konforty, Synereo CEO 2016

The idea of commercializing user-generated content is most readily experienced by way of advertising, and through the analysis of meta-data, which is sold to advertisers, so that they can better target their ads toward the likes and dislikes you offer up by way of your social media posting. While Facebook takes in record profits, an alternative type of Social Network platform is being built by Co-founders Dor Konforty and Greg Meredith, and the team behind Synereo With the launch of their Smart Social Contract language, and Social Network in the coming year, Synereo introduces an idea whose time has come. A social network to serve the commons, as a public utility, designed for the good of the people using it.
The below excerpt from the 2009 paper on personal data as currency, highlights this issue perfectly:

"We are moving towards a “Web of the world” in which mobile communications, social technologies and sensors are connecting people, the Internet and the physical world into one interconnected network.Data records are collected on who we are, who we know, where we are, where we have been and where we plan to go. Mining and analysing this data give us the ability to understand and even predict where humans focus their attention and activity at the individual, group and global level.
This personal data digital data created by and about people – is generating a new wave of opportunity for economic and societal value creation. The types, quantity and value of personal data being collected are vast: our profiles and demographic data from bank accounts to medical records to employment data. Our Web searches and sites visited, including our likes and dislikes and purchase histories. Our tweets, texts, emails, phone calls, photos and videos as well as the coordinates of our real-world locations. The list continues to grow. Firms collect and use this data to support individualised service-delivery business models that can be monetised. Governments employ personal data to provide critical public services more efficiently and effectively. Researchers accelerate the development of new drugs and treatment protocols. End users benefit from free, personalised consumer experiences such as Internet search, social networking or buying recommendations.
And that is just the beginning. Increasing the control that individuals have over the manner in which their personal data is collected, managed and shared will spur a host of new services and applications. As some put it, personal data will be the new “oil” a valuable resource of the 21st century, It will emerge as a new asset class touching all aspects of society.
At its core, personal data represents a post-industrial opportunity. It has unprecedented complexity, velocity and global reach. Utilizing a ubiquitous communications infrastructure, the personal data opportunity will emerge in a world where nearly everyone and everything are connected in real time. That will require a highly reliable, secure and available infrastructure at its core and robust innovation at the edge. Stakeholders will need to embrace the uncertainty, ambiguity and risk of an emerging ecosystem. In many ways, this opportunity will resemble a living entity and will require new ways of adapting and
responding. Most importantly, it will demand a new way of thinking about individuals.
“Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”
Meglena Kuneva, European
Consumer Commissioner,
March 2009

Many of these concepts and background information have been introduced in: Davis, Marc, Ron Martinez
and Chris Kalaboukis. “Rethinking Personal Information – Workshop Pre-read.” Invention Arts and World
Economic Forum, June 2010.

While this earlier work does not mention Blockchain technology, or reference any solutions to this problem of centralized, profit-driven social networking, this research does an excellent job introducing the perils which will follow such thinking.
In terms of solutions, one can look to Synereo's Smart Social Contracting language for a light to guide the conversation forward.

As Steemit introduces a working-prototype for what an attention economy can offer by way of a revenue distribution method for content creators, Synereo is dealing with the deeper issues related to the framework itself, the tech-stack, blockchain, consensus algorithms, all need to be evaluated in terms of the "highly reliable, secure and available infrastructure at its core and robust innovation at the edge. Stakeholders will need to embrace the uncertainty, ambiguity and risk of an emerging ecosystem. In many ways, this opportunity will resemble a living entity and will require new ways of adapting and
responding."
Synereo's approach, using Scala, and the Rho-Calculus, and Greg Meredith's work on the Casper project with Ethereum offer insight into the holistic approach which can be found throughout Synereo's tech-stack, as they work to build a truly scalable and optimized framework for the next social network, the one that belongs to it's users.

For more on this subject, we can look to a wonderful post by Synereo's Greg Meredith entitled,
Contracts, Composition, and Scaling

"As playful as the natural world is, natural actions have natural consequences.
The contract between client and service provider
can mean the difference between flourishing and failing, (think about a momma bird and her newly born chicks)
Yet, with stakes this high nature scales naturally. Gracefully. Beautifully.
Instinctively, we know how nature does this. Every child can see the tree in the leaf. Yet, we forget, and we only seem to remember, when we remember at all, at the crucial moment when we need to build systems at scale, and the systems we have built are failing. Like now.
The need for social contracts
Bitcoin and the blockchain pointed the way towards a trustless medium for financial and information-based exchange by which this generation can address the egregious failures of the financial systems and the states that allegedly regulate and govern them. By eliminating the role of the trusted 3rd party, this technology and the generation that adopts it has no use for financial institutions that are too big to fail, nor do they have to kowtow to government agencies that subsidize systemic irresponsibility with taxpayer funds. They can realize effective alternatives without having to stomach the absurdity that there’s no other way, nor wait for public institutions to come up to speed on the real potential of Internet technologies. However, the incumbent financial services layer is rich with complex financial instruments, a fact not lost on Ethereum and other emerging blockchain technologies.
These new offerings enrich the basics of the blockchain tool set with computationally complete platforms in which to re-engineer, and more importantly reimagine, the layer of financial instruments. Meanwhile, efforts like Factom recognize that blockchain isn’t just for keeping ledgers of who has how many quatloos. Records of land trust are frequently massively abused in many countries, and Factom is putting this information on the blockchain so that all can see a public record and attestation of ownership.
Likewise, Synereo recognizes that information flow goes hand in hand with financial instrumentation. Further, it’s not just about provenance. Contractual obligations in the blockchain enabled world are just as much about the when, where, and how of disclosure of sensitive information. Synereo introduces these ideas in a relatively low-risk setting of social networks, but this is primarily because we believe that establishing trust in the technology in low-risk settings, at Internet-wide scale is the right path to adoption in markets where there is more risk, such as freelance work, or dating, the exchange of medical records, or self-determination via the Internet.
Further, Synereo recognizes that a computationally complete platform needs two key elements to provide realistic and scalable services. First and foremost it needs a clear computational semantics grounded in formal methods. ML and Haskell are two prominent and popular languages enjoying this kind of grounding and their success is in no small measure derived from their foundations. Of course, these languages were conceived when computing was largely a desktop phenomenon, not the fabric of global society, taking place on billions of interconnected devices, with a communication topology that is continually dynamically reconfiguring. As such, neither language, nor the computational models on which their are based are particularly well suited for this new purpose. No, the computational semantics demanded must be one that suits the requirements of this time and place -- which is why Synereo’s contract language is based on the mobile process calculi, which provide, by design, a mathematical model of today’s computing infrastructure.
Secondly, but of equal weight, the computational platform must provide a means to constrain, probe, and examine contracts. The accepted way to do this in modern programming language design and programming language semantics is with types. Synereo’s contract language comes equipped with a modern, behavioral typing system. This system allows parties seeking to engage contractually with a means to probe the contractual obligations and guarantees in an automated way. This gives potential participants a chance to determine if becoming party to a particular contract is really the right choice.
Additionally, when a new technology makes it easy to forge or manufacture a useful artifact, what follows shortly after is a proliferation of such artifacts. Making it easy to create and execute smart contracts will invariably result in an abundance of smart contracts. Think about this for a minute. Smart contract is just another name for code. If we’ve learned nothing from source control systems from CVS to SVN to github, we should have learned that code is the dark matter of the Internet. Whether inside the corporate firewall or outside in the land of open source, searching for code that does just what needs to be done is a dark art, best left to wizards. Already, technologies like Hoogle are aimed at searching on the basis of type information. Synereo’s behavioral types makes it possible to take that idea much, much further -- to search code on the basis of how it is shaped and what it does -- not just what strings, keywords or phrases might happen to show up somewhere in its text.
Both of these features address scaling in several dimensions. Choosing a semantics that naturally reflects how computing actually happens in the Internet is of paramount importance. Ethereum’s choice of VM that imposes global serialization across Internet scale contracts is precisely why Ethereum V 1.0 won’t scale. Well, that and the fact that proof-of-work doesn’t scale, either. At DevCon1 Vitalik’s talk on scaling Ethereum admits just this. Both his proposals for changing the architecture and for the corresponding changes to the contract language that codes to it are several steps in the direction of the model Synereo has had from the beginning.
Where Synereo’s choices really begin to shine, however, are in the features that emerge from having a behavioral type system. One of the key aspects of scaling is not just how fast or how many, but who and why. Which agents will use the system and for what purpose? It won’t be long before the major corporate agencies realize that blockchain -- as currently rendered in running code -- is simply a much, much slower way to do things than their internal systems. It has virtually no use behind the corporate firewall. It’s real value is in the public domain between private agents. Add to this that the fact that it’s brand new technology will all manner of warts and risks and interest will wane very soon. Solving the speed and throughput problems alone won’t address this latter concern.

Behavioral Typing of Social Contracts means that -- for the first time -- we have a technology that can enforce information flow and liveness properties at Internet scale. This is the natural next step in trustlessness. Agents who never had a relationship can become party to an automated contract with certainty that that contract will not leak sensitive information, and that that contract will -- under appropriate guarantees -- reliably execute mission-critical transactions. These kinds of guarantees will bring corporate and governmental agency to the blockchain -- because these agencies are built on providing mission-critical services. But bringing these players to the table effectively shifts the balance of power back to the public that maintains such a valuable infrastructure. That’s scaling of a completely different color, to mix metaphors." -Greg Meredith Synereo CTO

Scaling of the nature Greg describes will depend on strong collaborations and partnerships between online and offline communities, to bring together the many different groups and factions, businesses and organizations, which must coalesce in order for an internet-scale technology to meet the minimum requirements of such massive adoption. The rewards far outweigh the powerful inertia of everyone already being on Facebook. There is very little loyalty to platforms when something better comes along. Oh the excitement to watch as it is built before our very eyes.