Adjustable privacy features: now available on the Ocean Market
Introduction
In collaboration with deltaDAO, we implemented new adjustable privacy features into Ocean Market.
If data owners want to spin up their data market based on Ocean Market, it will now include adjustable privacy features by design, including a privacy preference center, multi-language privacy policies, and more editable metadata.
Section 1 of this blog post discusses the need for decentralized data sharing solutions and explains how Ocean Protocol solves the current trade-off between using and monetizing private data and the risk of exposing it.
Section 2 explains how privacy-preserving data sharing with Oceans Compute-to-Data enables individuals and businesses to monetize private data while keeping full ownership and control.
Then we describe how Ocean follows privacy and security by design principles and explain the new privacy features that Ocean Market now offers by default. Following that, we include a brief How-to on how to use these features in practice when setting up a data market.
Background
AI loves data. The more data is available, the more accurate AI models become which leads to better business and research outcomes. It can help research, leading to life-altering innovations in science and technology.
However, while large amounts of valuable data are generated each year, data exchange, AI application and analysis are often aggravated by restrictions or concerns over security, privacy and associated regulatory risks. For example, the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines high potential fines for privacy breaches, which can be as high as 4% of a company’s annual turnover.
Thus, data often remains locked in silos and its value is underutilized. Data is hoovered up and used by a handful of big players. In the status quo, there is just not enough incentive to share data.
But: The confluence of blockchain, AI and data can very well be a lightning charge to spark an immense and far-reaching decentralized Data Economy. That is where Ocean Protocol comes in.
Ocean is built on a radical possibility: the potential for data to be shared openly without barriers. The idea was to build a decentralized data exchange protocol that enables anyone to publish and trade datasets that they have the right to. At its core Ocean aims to give people and organizations the power to take control of their data, share their data the way they want to, and monetize their data under their own terms. It aims to unlock an Open Data Economy.
deltaDAO AG acts as an integrator of the Ocean Protocol tech stack.
Adding more privacy-preserving features to the Ocean tech stack is one focus of the ongoing collaboration between deltaDAO and Ocean Protocol Foundation. In the last few months deltaDAO focused on
- improving the privacy features in Ocean Market
- building market and Compute-to-Data demonstrators, such as the Minimal Viable Gaia-X
- educating enterprises and consortia about the Web3 data economy and Ocean Protocol core design
Compute-to-Data (CtD)
Compute-to-Data allows for privacy-preserving data sharing, remote computation and data monetization and is a core feature and strong advantage of Ocean Protocol. CtD keeps the data on-premises and allows data consumers to run remote compute jobs on the data. Data owners keep full control as the data never leaves their premises and is only ever accessed by algorithms.
Compute-to-Data resolves the tradeoff between using private data and the risks of exposing it. Newly monetized data creates new revenue streams for data publishers. Price discovery using Automated Market Makers (AMMs) allows newly published data to be priced to market value.
CtD is directly integrated into Ocean Market, where data providers can opt to restrict the access type to “compute only”. Once data is made accessible, the compute job is brought to the data and executed on-premise. This is especially suitable to train AI models, calculate statistics or build business analytics use cases on private data without revealing them.
“The technology must default towards the ideals of data protection, towards democratizing data while retaining privacy rights. Compute-to-Data is Ocean’s response to solving the current trade-off between benefits of using private data and the risks of exposing it.” — Trent McConaghy, Co-Founder of Ocean Protocol
There is a multitude of applications in business, technology and science, benefitting from sufficient aggregation or anonymization of data. Moreover, data owners can approve only vetted and trusted algorithms, which further lowers privacy risk.
“Using Ocean Protocol, data consumers can train their AI models on remote private data sets and extract insights while ensuring compliance with privacy regulation. The data remains secure, it never leaves the owner’s premises.” — Frederic Schwill, Tech Lead at deltaDAO
Applications and business cases of Ocean’s CtD
Ocean’s CtD is a versatile technology that can be applied to problems and business cases of varying complexity.
In Ocean, a Compute-to-Data infrastructure is set up as a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster. The cluster runs in the background on, for example, cloud services like AWS or Azure or private infrastructure. This Kubernetes cluster is responsible for running the actual compute jobs, out of sight for marketplace clients and end-users. In its simplest form, it could compute an average. For example, getting an average of wages across offices of a multinational company can be difficult due to privacy regulations in different jurisdictions.
More advanced applications could feature statistics or business analytics use cases, for example doing remote analytics across the supply chain of certain automakers.
CtD is especially useful when applied to verticals like the health sector, where Ocean Protocol enables the possibility to train machine learning models across patient data residing at different hospitals. CtD applied in the health sector can accelerate advancements in science and research, ultimately contributing to saving more lives faster.
Privacy-preserving data monetization
CtD, combined with Ocean Protocol’s built-in data monetization layer is a powerful tool to enable sustainable business models around private data lakes. Users can benefit from this technology in a number of ways. Developers can quickly launch their own data marketplace, using Ocean software components while connected to the Ocean decentralized data-sharing network.
Data owners can sell the private data in a marketplace while maintaining control:
- Privacy: sell private data, while preserving privacy. It stays private because only AI algorithms see the data directly.
- Control: data assets remain secure. Control stays with data owners because data never leaves the premises.
Data consumers can access private data without the liability of directly seeing private data.
AI practitioners & data scientists can access valuable, private data that was previously unavailable, which can lead to more accurate AI models to improve research and business outcomes.”
Following privacy and security by design principles
Being based on blockchain, Ocean Protocol has some key advantages compared to traditional Web2 data sharing solutions:
It is radically different from the traditional manner we exchanged data in the past, which usually involves giving up control and using a middleman mediating between data market participants. The middleman is a single point of failure and could use the data for their own benefit or have their data stolen, as regularly reported in the media.
Following security and privacy by design principles and giving control back to the user, are key elements of the GDPR. Ocean gives full control and sovereignty to data owners. Moreover, compared to Web2 solutions, Ocean Market requires minimal personal data.
NEW: Adjustable privacy features
The Ocean Market is an out-of-the-box data marketplace for monetizing data — both with an Ocean reference marketplace and the promise to allow developers to build their own marketplaces to monetize data. Here data can be bought or sold in a privacy-preserving fashion using CtD.
If data owners want to spin up their data market based on Ocean Market, it will now include adjustable privacy features by design. Here’s how:
- Multi-language privacy policies. Ocean Market delivers a privacy policy in English, German, Spanish, and French to inform the market users adequately and transparently about the processing operations. These policies are free to use and can be quickly adjusted to your needs so that you can get started right away and worry less about regulations.
- Facilitated introduction of new policies: Moreover, Ocean Market provides easy to edit markdown files to enable you to easily add and remove privacy policies. You can add a policy by providing your own markdown file in the content/pages/privacy directory.
- Privacy preference center. There is also a configurable privacy preference center. We offer a simple configuration for showing a cookie banner, as well as a more advanced setup. If your use case requires it, you can now configure a fine-grained preference center for marketing or analytics cookies, which require user consent.
- History Table: The history table is a transparency feature you can use to quickly overview the transactions you made on Ocean Market.
- Disclaimers. To increase transparency even further, Ocean Market provides several disclaimers to inform users about privacy implications.
- Editable metadata: After publishing a data asset you can rectify your metadata (e.g. the author field) at any time.
- Data Lifecycle Management: You can restrict the processing of your personal data on Ocean Market by using Purgatory, a mechanism to hide any data asset from Ocean Market.
How to use the new privacy features
If you are new to Ocean Market, head over to our dedicated beginners guide on how to Launch a blockchain-based data marketplace in under 1 hour.
After finishing the initial setup of your data market, depending on your use case, you may want to enable the features mentioned above.
To get started and display a simple pre-configured cookie banner, head to your .env file in the root of your repository. If you do not yet have a .env file you can just create one.
Make sure you have the file saved at the same location as shown below:
Now copy and paste the following into the file:
GATSBY_PRIVACY_PREFERENCE_CENTER=”true”
You will notice a few changes when you now run your market with the following command: npm start.
First, you will notice a cookie banner that is now appearing in the bottom left corner (1). Additionally, a link to open this banner again is now displayed in the footer (2).
Now, to configure everything that is displayed within the privacy preference center, you can open the “content” folder and navigate to a file called “gdpr.json”. Open it up and you will see the configurations for our privacy preference center.
You can change the title, body and even the text on the buttons in this file. Additionally, you will notice a variable called “optionalCookies”. Here you can configure which optional cookies your market implementation uses and give the user the option to opt-in or out of each category individually.
If you click on the “Customize” button in the cookie banner of your running market, you will see the additional preferences a user can set.
To make use of those preferences, head over to the CookieConsent provider located in the “provider” folder in the “src” directory. Open the “CookieConsent.tsx” file and you will find two functions that are of special interest. “handleAccept” and “handleReject”. Each time the user changes their settings on any given cookie category, these functions will be called respectively. The “cookieName” passed over to the functions is the same you set in the “gdpr.json” file.
To make interaction with cookies a little easier for you we also provide a helper file named “cookie.ts” located in the “utils” folder within the “src” directory. You can import the “setCookie” and “deleteCookie” functions, as well as the “getCookieValue” function anywhere in your code to easily handle your cookies.
But there’s more! Let’s say your market will only use strictly necessary cookies and you want to display a cookie banner only to inform users. In that case, you can go ahead and delete the “optionalCookies” variable in the “gdpr.json” config file altogether. Now change the text of the cookie banner and give the close button a more fitting label and you are all set.
Your users will now be presented with a simple cookie banner informing them of your use of cookies, which they can acknowledge.
Conclusion
For Ocean, secure data sharing is a means to an end: it enables staking, pricing, curating, and incentivization to share. Until now, anyone looking to provide data for sale would need to set up companies, figure out the back-office, build sales and distribution channels and then provide the actual value of the data. With Ocean, those barriers are much, much lower.
Ocean Protocol resolves the current trade-off between the benefits of using private data and the risks of exposing it. Ocean follows security and privacy by design principles, giving control and sovereignty back to data owners.
If you want to spin up a data market based on Ocean Market, it will already support all privacy features out of the box.
“The increasing loss of control over one’s own data and the non-transparent way in which companies exploit users requires change. Ocean Protocol enables this change.” — Meike Molitor, Compliance Lead at deltaDAO AG.
About deltaDAO
deltaDAO AG is the first “Ocean Protocol” engineering, integration, and consulting company — entirely founded, built, led, operated, and owned by Ocean Protocol community members and supporters. deltaDAO’s mission is to build towards a European data economy powered by “Ocean Protocol”. Open source, decentralized, GDPR-compliant, and in accordance with European values.
If you want to build business cases on top of Ocean Protocol or integrate your use-case or application into the upcoming Gaia-X Hackathon in early December 2021, please contact our partners at deltaDAO.
