Introducing 0box — solving privacy issues for the consumer and business
I’m sure many of you are aware that privacy issues have been a burgeoning concern for users of social media platforms. This year the issues are prominent, especially with recent Senate hearings of Facebook and Google. Our thesis is that 0box provides transparency and control of data to the consumer, and it alleviates the privacy image of a social internet company, while helping them achieve even higher revenues.
Before jumping to the 0box solution, let me briefly discuss the 0chain storage and token protocol. 0chain is the world’s fastest blockchain, built ground up, and infinitely scalable. Our innovative protocol allows a user to lock tokens to earn interest which they can use toward services on the 0chain network, such as sending transactions and storing data. Users are free to pay directly for services with their tokens, but they are better off using the interest tokens that are free and generated by the network.
Today all social platforms typically use AI algorithms to mine consumer data to serve better ads to achieve higher click-throughs. Since social platform business models are built on collecting personal data, it is a balancing act between revenue generation and the perception that they tend to make it difficult for users to disable such settings. If we can build a platform that avoids such trickery, then it would solve the pain points of both parties — the social platform dilemma on revenue generation, and consumer data privacy.
Our solution to such a problem is simple. Give the consumer transparency and control of where their data is stored, accessed, and the validity of their data privacy, and then let them decide whether they would like to monetize such data. The consumer has a complete and transparent view of their data on 0box via the 0chain blockchain. They can keep track of uploads to their folder and downloads from such.
Let’s consider different application scenarios.
Analytics Data Folder
When a user surfs the home page and individual pages of a website, their data is tracked and sent to Google Analytics or any other analytics platform providers. To remove any privacy issues and have better compliance than GDPR guidelines, the analytics platform company can record this data, sign it, and upload it to 0box in the User’s Analytics Folder (named as an example but you can call it a Cookie Folder if you like).
The user can determine whether they authorize some or all of such data to be tracked. Now if anyone wants to access this data, they pay the user and the Analytics platform provider. In this scenario, everyone wins. The user, analytics provider, social application provider, and advertiser. And the ultimate control resides with the user along with complete transparency.
While the idea of 0box is to help the user take back control of their private data, the idea of a user willing to share additional metadata in exchange for tokens is intriguing. Let’s consider the scenario where the user provides additional metadata about them, such as their demographics (age, gender, race), their profile (height, weight, etc), their medical needs, then the tracked data has additional value to tune the advertising campaign. In fact, there is no need for expensive AI to determine the motivation of the user, because they are freely sharing such information, showing the trend, and consumer mindset. The big data analytics market is a pretty big one, and for good reason, as it predicts the consumer behavior, trend, and demand for products and services.
Another example of an application is where the user wants to disclose their Credit Score to only certain parties. They can have Experian, TransUnion upload their scores and authorize credit card companies to get that information for a fee in order to market their offering. In fact, instead of getting your score affected due to a hard inquiry penalty, you will be able to get better credit card deals and get paid in the process!
Creative Works Folder
Consumer content platforms such as YouTube do not address small artists. New rules alienate small publishers. Let’s consider the case where the artist is a) well known through other social media platform, and b) a small publisher that has about 1000 followers. In the latter case (b), the small publisher can host the content on YouTube and share the video for free or host it on 0box (for free via locked tokens) and charge a nominal fee for their creation. At least, in the latter case, the user generates some revenue, which they can use toward their marketing activity and content generation. In the former case, if the well-known artist has a million followers, they can share the 0box link to their content folder and price it lower than they expect to get from ad clicks. If the famous artist were to host on YouTube, they still need to promote their content on social networks. The average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) in 2018 for YouTube is $9.68 and $3.21 for CPC. A video with 1000 views would have earned $5.34. Now consider them selling the video for $0.25c to their fans — even if only 25% ardent followers download it, then they would have made about as much on 0box. The users either pay a bit or get it for free with locked tokens, and get access to the content without any distracting advertisement.
Other platforms such as Spotify, Apple and Pandora favor the larger artists as well. It is important to point out that we do not compete with the larger players, but just that we are providing a platform for up-and-coming artists to have visibility and earn some revenue for their works.
Indeed, the large social platforms can benefit by partnering with 0box to provide transparency and control to their customers, since the cost of our network is “zero” if they lock enough tokens, and they don’t need to change their revenue model with their customers. And they can now experiment with new models.
Spotify pays about $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream, split among the record label, producers, artists, and songwriters. Spotify generally takes about 50% of the revenue. As a baseline, the №1 music (from Taylor Swift) earned between $280,000 and $390,000 for 46.3 million streams, according to one report. For small artists, an estimate shows that 1 million plays on Spotify translates to around $7,000, and one million plays on Pandora generates $1,650. In the 0box revenue model, a Taylor Swift song may be downloaded directly to the user, where they pay for the music directly to the songwriter. Since American spend about 32 hours per week listening to music, it means they listen to about 3000 streams per month. But most of them are not unique streams. Indeed, most people love listening to the recent hits or oldies several times a day. For the 0box model, if we assume that about 1/10 of people download the streams then the price for each Taylor Swift song download needs to be just $0.1 per download to make up for equivalent revenue (4.6m subscribers x 0.1 = 0.46m = 460k). For smaller artists, at 1/10thstream/download ratio, this would be 100k subscribers x 0.1 = $10k.
In the worst-case scenario, artists, platforms, and users can benefit from a higher payout and lower cost. In the best-case scenario the users pay through their “locked” tokens and hence from their perspective it’s a “free” service, and the content providers and platforms have their earned tokens appreciate in value.
For bloggers and other content creators, they can share links to their monetized content, and get paid for such. They just need to write an enticing abstract about their article on Medium, Twitter or Facebook or brand name journal publications to entice people to download the rest of the content to read it.
A simple private backup for Consumer data
While we don’t intend to compete with DropBox, we have created the first “example” product on the 0chain platform that would do just that for a niche group of consumers that care about their personal data, especially about their images, posts, and videos. Preserving the privacy of your wall post is something the application platform need to take care of in a similar construct as discussed in the first section. Applications could generate metadata based on your post and place in your Social Folder, where 3rd parties can purchase such data to analyze it.
However, protecting your images and videos is something you can directly control it by placing all of them on 0box and pasting a link on your social wall for your friends to grab those images and videos. If you place an enticing picture or a thumbnail of a video, your friends will likely click on it. You will be able to view each upload and download on the blockchain, and have a transparent ledger of payments of your monetized content.
Enterprise HRM & CRM
As with Box or DropBox Business, 0box can be used by enterprise, but perhaps for a different application. While collaboration is the key driver for such business, we feel 0box is suited for enterprises that want to show transparency about their employee and customer data and protect such data. The enterprise can upload all content about the employee to the employee’s HR (Human Resources) folder. They can upload all customer information to customer’s CRM (customer relationship management) folder and be transparent about their privacy, display who uploaded the data, and record all downloads of such data by the company or 3rd parties. Such transparency does not exist today and is now warranted by most employee and customers of an organization. The company would also prefer a secured approach to protect privacy and reduce their exposure to any legal costs associated with data breaches, and brand disparagement. Some major breaches that has occurred in the past, at Yahoo, Marriott,and Quora, can be very expensive, and easily avoided with moving such data to 0box and having a simple construct that is available and integral to the 0chain platform.
For certain verticals such as HealthCare, it is imperative to have privacy issues protected and have a compliance that adheres to HIPAA privacy guidelines, but at the same time offer users the ability to share data easily. Hospitals and healthcare providers are careful to make sure all the data are correctly recorded and results are kept private. A blockchain approach where all scans and lab results are kept in 0box verified via 0chain, is a bullet-proof way to ensure that user has visibility of their data accessed by people that they have authorized. In addition, it gives the power to the user to share such data to another physician for a second opinion in an easy manner without the need for a secure email setup that is currently in place.
First version of 0box
The initial 0box release on the 0chain blockchain will have a simple feature set. Users lock tokens or allocate directly required tokens for a certain storage allocation (e.g. 1TB). When they upload files, they are automatically sent to the least expensive blobbers(storage providers). The list of blobbers are on the blockchain, since each service provider of 0chain needs to register with the network. If the blobbers offer the same price, then they are randomly picked. The client collects all signed contracts from the blobbers and sends a transaction with the list to the blockchain. Then it starts uploading files to the blobber. Once the file is committed, people can read from the blobbers. The health (reliability, availability) of the file is checked on a regular basis, and if anything is amiss, then the repair protocol takes care of it in the background.
Users can create as many allocations. All allocations are private and can be shared via links on any platform. When a user clicks on the link, it invokes the 0chain mobile or desktop app to download the file, which can be viewed on any relevant app that can view or play the file.
On the monetization part, users can assign any value to their allocation. All prices are based on tokens/GB downloaded, and so users can have multiple allocation at different prices.
Later on, we will have additional features for users to control which blobbers they can send the data, and how they can split the earnings, say to a distribution agency or studio.
We’re excited about what 0box can do and how it can realign privacy and business objectives of the consumer and the company. If you’re interested in 0box, I encourage you to sign up to keep abreast of news. For partnerships, drop us a note at sales@0chain.net. We expect to go live with our product when 0chain blockchain MainNet is live, expected sometime in late March. Prior to that we will have alpha and beta versions of our MainNet in January and February as shown on our roadmap.
