Rebalancing the data economy: restarting startups

The big data era has created valuable resources for achieving results of public interest, such as health care. Over the past 18 months, scientists have demonstrated the benefits of speeds in response to the kovid-19 pandemic — faster than any other disease in history — the benefits of obtaining, sharing, and extracting value from a wider range of assets.

With access to data from 56 million National Health Service (NHS) patients, UK public health researchers provided some of the strongest data on hidden risk factors for death and long-lived covetousness and access to health records to develop life-saving medical treatments created by Moderna and Pfizer. Like RNA vaccines.

But balancing the benefits of data sharing with the protection of individual and organizational privacy is a tricky, and reasonable, process. Governments and companies are gathering an increasing amount of data, demanding research, privacy concerns and stricter regulation.

“Data is gaining momentum in innovation, and should be used for public benefit, while individual privacy is protected. This is new and unfamiliar ground for policy making, and it needs a detailed approach, ”wrote David Deming, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. The latest article in the New York Times.

The number of launches is increasing, by about 230 and counting Data Collaborations—Children, non-profit groups and governments are working to increase their control over their data.

These startups are adopting legal and institutional structures, such as data trusts, cooperatives and managers, to help individuals and organizations provide the means to collect and use relevant data efficiently and securely — and in the process. Big Tech controls the data economy.

“The relationship between data and society is fundamentally broken,” says Matt Gee, CEO of Brighthive, as it helps networks and organizations implement alternative governance models, including reliable data, data commons and data cooperatives.

“We think there should be more cooperation instead of competition, it should be more open and transparent, it should be more distributed and democratic instead of monopolistic. In this way, we can make profits fairer and reduce harmful biases in the data. ”

Access and control

The pandemic has shown that medical research and public health planning can be enriched by obtaining electronic health records, prescription and drug data, and epidemiology. But health data is also highly sensitive, and a public analysis of efforts to share it is understandable. The so-called “secondary use,” which applies personal health information to uses outside of health care, requires a new governance framework.

Findata is an independent authority of the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare, created by a government law in May 2019. The agency facilitates researchers ’access to health data in Finland, provides permission to use it, or responds to specific statistical requests. In doing so, it aims to protect the interests of citizens, while also taking into account the value that their data can place on medical research, teaching and health planning.

Prior to the creation of the refinery, it was expensive and complex for researchers to access this essential research resource. “The purpose of this agency is to streamline and secure the use of health data,” explained Refinery Director Johanna Seppänen.

“Previously, if you wanted to have data from different registries or hospitals, you had to make four requests, and there was no standard way to manage them, no way to set prices. It was a very long, difficult and confusing time.”

Findata is the only such agency so far, but it may inspire other countries that want to add more value to health data in a safe and secure way.

The UK has recently faced the NHS go back over and above the reforms made by privacy campaigns to improve public health data sharing, showing the challenges that attempts to change data collection and sharing protocols can bring.

Empowerment and autonomy

Supporting unauthorized individuals and groups has been another focus of the new data governance bodies.

Data controllers“They range from community-based collectives to public or private organizations,” they act as intermediaries and custodians in exchanging data, helping individuals and communities to better navigate the data economy and better negotiate their data rights, ”says Suha Mohamed, strategist and collaborator. Aapti, an organization that works at the crossroads of technology and society, based on data rights.

One example of how data controllers can be useful for people in the gig economy is the fast-growing labor market, which has had the prevalence of short-term contracts or self-employment over fixed jobs, and has been full. power differences.

“Asymmetric data control is one of the main levers of power that concert platforms use to manage their staff and shape narrative and public policies in the field in which they operate,” says Hays Witt, co-founder and CEO of Driver’s Seat, a driver-hailing data co-operative. specialized in.

“Very few people have the data they need to work productively and constructively, starting with the concert staff themselves. Our premise [at Driver’s Seat] that is, let’s use a technology and data cooperative so that concert staff can collect, collect, and share their data, ”says Witt.

The driver’s seat has developed a proprietary app through which employees can submit information about their location, work and earnings, which can then be combined and analyzed. They then receive feedback to help drivers understand their actual earnings and performance, where, when, on what platforms and under what conditions they should work.

Driver’s seat Drivers are developing tools to tell the actual average salary on their city platforms to compare it to average salaries and whether the salary is rising or falling. All of this can help drivers move to platforms that provide better treatment, otherwise strengthening the atomized workforce.

“Our drivers are very happy to be concerned about the day-to-day experiences of seeing platforms that they don’t trust because they don’t trust them,” says Witt. “They know that metrics have an impact. Everyday experience data is completely mediated. It affects their earnings and lives, and they know it.”

Witt believes that in the future, workers can help more and more people to “develop collective analysis of their problems, which means they can propose collective policy solutions or agreements to negotiate with the employment platform.”

Balancing social mission and business models

All data startups, be they government-sanctioned organizations or companies like Findata or business entrepreneurs like Driver’s Seat, face the challenge of balancing their mission with operational sustainability.

The main challenge for nonprofit groups and social impact businesses is to have a sustainable financial base. For data equity organizations, the funding mix includes community- and membership-oriented approaches and philanthropic support.

But some organizations, like Brighthive, have found profit-making models where private-sector companies want to improve data governance and are willing to pay for it.

Brighthive’s Gee “describes what is happening around AI regulation in the European Union and describes commercial customers who want to advance in the US. They are taking a proactive stance as an alternative model for governing algorithmic transparency, equity audits and how they use customer data.”

Other data equity platforms have found revenue models in which beneficiary data can be positively exploited by third parties in a social way. Hays Witt at Driver’s Seat cites the example of municipal authorities and planning agencies.

Both authorities and drivers have an incentive to reduce the “dead time” that drivers drive without earning money, creating emissions and congestion. If the right data can be collected, collected and analyzed in a useful way, it can lead to better traffic and mobility decisions and infrastructure interventions. So all participants are beneficial.

Witt noted other “neutral” cases where beneficiary data could be valuable to unrelated private sector entities in ways that do not work against the interests of drivers. He cites the example of commercial real estate developers who are often forced to make decisions about investment and services based on outdated traffic and mobility data.

The driver’s seat is being considered to provide such companies with joint analytical products to help concert workers who have returned income as dividends and help finance the cooperative.

Many data launchers looking for sustainable revenue opportunities have to decide where they want to draw based on the type of work or the types of businesses they are willing to work for.

Brighthive’s Matt Gee has a growing interest in investors in startups that can help companies navigate the end of “cookies,” which have been critical of third-party advertising but are now disappearing. “Investors are concerned about the death of third-party data and are hungry for the companies that run it,” he says.

But as socially-minded startups earn more business from corporate businesses, they need to balance their role for the good of society with the economic gain of contract profits.

“Does being a public benefit corporation do more with what you do and how you do it or with whom you work? If we work with data partnerships that provide transparency and accountability to the marketing organizations that collect customer lists, are we really reducing social damage? Our team is constantly those are the questions he deals with, ”says Geek.

Data launches will inevitably face challenges such as balancing social mission, ethics, and business models, but as the data economy grows, they are in a unique position to responsibly leverage the way data can give citizens a sense of how organizations and governments share data from Big Tech they move away.

“Our data economy needs to be based on creating value for everyone in society and this requires user control, reliable mediation and collective governance to be embedded in innovative data management models,” says Sushant Kumar, head of responsible technology at the social change company Omidyar. Net.

“Incorporating a critical mass of users, receiving regulatory support, and achieving financial sustainability will ensure that these designs are able to break the status quo and incorporate fairness into the current paradigm.”

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