Ownership of Your Data

“If You’re Not Paying for It, You’re the Product” — Unknown

Social networks have proliferated over the last several years. They have become an integral part of our lives, to the point where they can control our actions or how we behave, as evidenced by Facebook’s experiment with emotions of its users.

This is but one example of how technology has become a double edged sword. Issues about personal privacy, data protection and ownership of information have surfaced, rightfully, over increased flows of information. These issues regarding ownership of personal information and commercialisation of such information must be fixed once and for all. This is our core focus.

The average social media user might not realise it, but social networks have value. Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. Our information and interactions build a profile of ourselves, and our inclinations and ability to spend, which becomes valuable to advertisers.

One obvious manifestation of this is the USD 3.4 billion that Snapchat raised during its IPO despite its loss generating revenue model. The 158 million active users (and growing) of that network represented value that could be tapped by advertising. In fact, Google and Amazon, some of the most ubiquitous internet platforms that we use everyday, were the earliest to tap into the information of users on their platforms.

We feel that the root cause of the problem that plagues social networks is the current model of centralisation. Centralisation gives rise to three problems:

the economic problem

the autonomy problem

the trust problem

The economic problem

Social networks are public goods that contribute significantly to the well-being of users when they are provided (we can attest to social media being a huge part of our lives) but are impossible to charge for use. Ordinarily, this would result in a market failure, as no corporation would want to provide a platform for free, and society would accordingly incur significant welfare losses. As such, providers of social networks have turned to advertising as a revenue stream, doing so by requiring users to assign rights to their content and information to the provider and selling them to advertisers and recruiters. In a sense, social media is not “free” for use, it is being paid for by micro-incursions of privacy and future revenue from the information produced by users. We feel the current model is inequitable — users should be able to reap the rewards of the information they produce; we believe that free use and equitable revenue distribution are not inconsistent concepts.

The autonomy problem

The centralised nature of social media today means that the platform is almost entirely controlled by the platform providers, with users having limited say over the direction of the platform. We find it unsettling that platform providers have an almost unlimited license; it opens the door to potential abuses. In fact, the aforementioned experiment by Facebook to influence emotions felt by users just goes to show how much control users have over something central to their daily lives. We feel that user communities should determine the course of, and contribute to the platform, and in doing so take ownership of a platform that is uniquely theirs.

The trust problem

Closely linked to the autonomy problem, the trust problem is the result of concentration of power in the hands of the platform providers. Although we are inclined to believe that the developers are responsible and committed individuals who act in accordance with the terms of use (ie. do the right thing), the potential for abuse remains. For instance, Facebook’s moderators censored a photograph depicting the atrocities of the Vietnam War because it contained nudity, and in so doing, missed the point about the photograph’s intention. As our platform deals with personal information and the authenticity of such information, it is important that no one centralised body has power to determine such facts without oversight. The real world implications would be unfathomable.

To be clear, we are not against advertising, and we are most certainly not against social media. However, we are against the centralisation of social media. We believe the solution is a new model of social networks — a decentralised one that places ownership of information back in the hands of the users.

The advent of a Skills Economy

Where it used to be the case that a qualification was valuable as a representation of the knowledge acquired during the period of study, this is no longer true. Today, information shifts occur with increasing frequency and rapidity. What is learnt in school could become obsolete very quickly, and it is not uncommon to find individuals employed in positions with little relation to what they had studied in college. Some of these may have been the result of consolidation of various jobs, each different in scope; others may not have existed before. The idea of school as an institution for the imparting of knowledge cannot account for these trends in the workforce.

We have also witnessed the commodification of education. While it used to be the case that higher education was the exclusive domain of a few in the past, today higher education has seen a rapid increase in the number of students, as a result of a push to make good education (and better jobs) more accessible to everyone. Institutes of higher education have proliferated, and technology has made it possible to earn a higher qualification without being physically enrolled in school.

Where we are located in Singapore, the government has announced the goal of increasing the higher education participation rate to 40% of each student cohort by 2020. Some students are lamenting their bleak employment prospects upon leaving school. Elsewhere in countries like China, India and South Korea, graduates are spilling out of higher education institutes in record numbers, but many are unable to find jobs after graduation. The numbers game no longer works out in favour of the many university graduates who are chasing an ever smaller pool of jobs.

What then is the value of qualifications, if not as representations of knowledge or scarcity? We believe that qualifications are representations of skills acquired. In this age of constant influx of information and knowledge, the only constant is change. That, and deep skills which allow us to ride the changes. The right skills allow us to adapt to situational and information changes quickly and flexibly; they are our means of navigating this increasingly complex world. So it seems the academics and governments are not that far off in their claims — our economy is the skills economy.

Enabling Crowd Economics 2.0

We believe that new economic models are being enabled with technologies like Ethereum. With these advances, we can enable millions of previously excluded people to participate in the next wave of economic change. Unlike past cycles where only those who owned the assets could profit from their usage, in the new decentralized model, millions and perhaps billions of people can now be direct economic beneficiaries of the businesses they are consumers of. As economic beneficiaries, the user is also more likely to utilize the service and tell others about it. This creates a virtuous cycle of growth and opportunity for all.

Growing the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

Throughout the eventful history of the cryptocurrency market it has been rather difficult for new users to enter and access their first tokens. Typically, users must register at exchanges, clear KYC hurdles and transfer money from their bank accounts to the exchanges. This is often met with difficulties as banks have not been the most supportive institutions in the decentralization revolution.

By allowing users an easy way to earn rewards for the activities that benefit them, we are lowering the barriers to entry into the cryptocurrency ecosystem and so enabling a billion new people to become holders and users of cryptocurrencies.

How are we solving this?

Indorse is an attempt to give back ownership of data to users. A platform which is not only fun, but also rewarding to the contributors of the content. Here, the value of the content is accrued to the users who create it.

We will also also design in-built mechanisms and integrations with other applications like uPort to minimize the damage caused by Sybil attacks. It will also have an in-platform currency and token system where the honest contributors will be rewarded for their contributions while the persons who make the wrong indorsement will be penalised.

The users own their identity on the network and the assets of the network itself. The crowd economy is not only about sharing assets, it’s about the crowd owning, sharing and profiting from those assets which they fund, build and use. We are giving professionals, and for that matter anyone, an avenue to put up their documents and have a choice whether to advertise their personal information, with full control over their data.

What’s more, instead of relying on a central authority like a notary or a University to “attest” that you indeed hold such academic credentials, we are giving that power back to the public!

To be clear, validation is not a strict attestation to the factual accuracy of the claim. A validated claim can be taken to be true, on a balance of probabilities, as verified by the indorsement process of the platform. It would be ideal to achieve 100% confidence in the factual accuracy of the claim, but very often we don’t require 100% confidence. Most of the time, “good enough” works out fine. This is our aim — to give any credential a certain degree of validity and vote of confidence, one that is good enough a standard to be used for most things in life.

This platform can be likened to a combination of a decentralized LinkedIn and Instagram, but with “verified” claims and indorsements. It has mechanisms to reward good actors and penalise bad ones.

Why Ethereum?

The platform needs a network effect to succeed. While existing social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have bootstrapped the growth of their networks, new technologies like blockchain have put us in a better position to kickstart these kinds of networks. We see this as a unique opportunity to tap on the existing blockchain communities in order to create a network to begin with and incentivize the supporters themselves to use it.

Among blockchains, Ethereum provides the much needed transparency needed for a crowd economy to succeed and incentivize its own growth. Hence we are using Ethereum as our compute engine, while using IPFS as the storage mechanism.

While the Ethereum community is relatively young, it is one of the fastest growing, and shows no signs of slowing down. Today, there is a growing base of developers using Ethereum, with an estimated 30,000 developers working on various projects related to the Ethereum protocol, any of whom can write smart contracts and decentralised applications that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. There are hundreds of decentralised applications that have been created or are in the pipelines, and these are only the ones we know of. To date, no other blockchain protocol, not even the market leader Bitcoin, has this level of interactivity with the core blockchain protocol. In fact, Ethereum has already surpassed Bitcoin in it’s own way: there are now more developers and nodes on Ethereum than there are on Bitcoin.

The nature of Ethereum makes it a natural fit for the project that we want to create. We envision Indorse to be decentralised and transparent, with its’ own ecosystem of dApps that feed into and rely on the platform for information. For that, we are building Indorse on this future proof platform.