Mike Davie Speaks with 938NOW on “Murky Data”
This week our founder and CEO, Mike Davie, was interviewed by Keith De Souza for Radio 9.38 NOW business talk show “Your Morning Fix,” a trusted information source for Singaporean executives and business people who want to stay up to date while on the go. Mike explained how Quadrant is well positioned to fix the broken data economy, by introducing a trusted decentralized system.
Mike explained that the current data market is broken because inevitably there are bad actors looking to cheat the system. They feed bad data into the system, and data purchasers are not able to verify which data are genuine and which are faulty. This, in turn, produces inaccurate results which misrepresent market trends, because computers and algorithms are only as good as the information they are supplied with. Garbage in, garbage out.
The conversation then turned to the issue of privacy as relates to the data economy, particularly when it comes to personal data. In the GDPR era, there is a lot of concern about this. But Mike clarified that there is a misconception of the relationship between private data and big data. Big data comprises everything that creates data, and companies and governments are spending billions of dollars to gather more of it and improve their products, make more money, offer better services, reduce costs or adopt better decision-making processes. For example, a business looking to locate its next store is only concerned with the number of people crossing a street daily, which individuals did so or why.
Mike moved on to discuss another key issue in the space, which is that executives buy datasets from vendors who don’t themselves know the origin of the information. In a best case scenario, this results in data sourced only from a small number of sources covering a limited segment of the market. At worst, they are making decisions based on highly manipulated, copied, inauthentic or obsolete data, which results in faulty conclusions with serious knock-on effects for the economy. When asked how a person could verify the trustworthiness of data, he responded that until now, the technology has not existed. Linked to this is regulation. As governments continue to crack down on personal data use, they are increasingly asking businesses to report the origins of their data. With millions to be invested and new sensors and technologies to be invested, the competition will become more proactive and data vendors will now have an interest in verifying their source of origin.
Mike had the opportunity to explain why Quadrant Protocol’s process of “data stamping” is positioned to change industry standards to define the origin and quality of data. Quadrant stamps data at its source, allowing users to track it all the way back to the moment it was created, no matter how many layers it has gone through. If we can create this kind of trust, then it will become easier for companies to comply with regulatory demands, easier for smaller data producers to sell their data, safer for data consumers to purchase data.
Of course, we would be remiss not to speak about Singapore as a global data centre, with the governmental authorities investing millions to build an active ecosystem. Mike pointed out the Board of Tourism as a characteristic example.
We wish to thank Radio 938 NOW for the opportunity to discuss this topic.
You can listen to the whole interview here:
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