The changing paradigm of Big Data

“The 2010s was the decade of Big Data.
The 2020s will be the decade of privacy.”

Big Data has changed people, now people change big data.

  • People are not Luddites. People love what online and the cloud can offer.
  • Connected data is more than just convenience:  health, genome-driven precision medicine, AI and autonomous systems, industrial internet, …
  • But not at all costs:
  • No one wants to feel exploited
  • The threats are real. It is not just an annoyance. More than just money will be lost.
  • Cloud services often mean “lock-in” for businesses – giving away your trade secret might just not work for all. 
  • And policy changes, too. GDPR is just the beginning.

Incorporating privacy

A stack of technologies was just invented that finally does the trick:

  • Homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs for privacy preserving computation
  • Federated learning to train models decentralized for privacy preserving AI
  • True peer-to-peer networks as data infrastructure without a single point of failure.

Technology is ready

  • Researchers at Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and others have defined standards and opened homomorphic encryption for broad application.
  • Zero-knowledge proofs have been working flawlessly in cryptocurrencies such as zCash and Monero for years
  • Federated learning has been pushed to be ready by the AI and chatbot wave.
  • The blockchain offers true secure and trustable peer-to-peer interactions without intermediation.