Category: ProductNation

Quick Update: We have submitted our response on 30 January 2018. You can find it on this link

It is widely known that the amount of data generated daily worldwide is rising at an incredibly exponential rate. Yet, what remains shrouded is how this data, particularly those data types concerning or generated by us, as individuals, are being used and stored by both the public and private sector. As we move into a data-driven world, it is crucial that the laws developed around Data center on the premise of both empowering and protecting the individual. In fact, the main purpose of the 4th layer of India Stack, the “consent layer”, is just this: to provide for a set of tools and utilities, as part of the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), that  empower citizens to assert control over their data.

The Justice Srikrishna led committee of experts has released a White Paper articulating their provisional thoughts on the Data Protection Framework, and are seeking public comments on the subject. iSPIRT will be submitting a formal response to the White Paper. This blog post lays out our current views regarding Data Protection and we seek suggestions and comments from the larger iSPIRT community as we finalize these into iSPIRT views.

 Restoring balance between the individual and data controller

From social media platforms to online loan applications, to ride-sharing apps, many of the services we access regularly require mandatory data collection from the individual to the data controller, either on a one-time but often on a recurring basis. Data collected by data controllers often gets used in ways far outside the stated purpose. This in turn automatically places the individual at a data-disadvantage, so to speak. We believe that this current industry practice is an anomaly and data collected must be used only for the purpose it was collected for and nothing else. The law should work towards enforcing this principle and aim to restore balance across all elements of the privacy construct i.e consent, notice, choice, etc.

In addition, the use cases for data are also rapidly evolving. Without empowering the individual, in addition to restoring the balance, a data protection law cannot be considered complete; bringing us to the second core principle.

Data should be used to empower and not for harm

Indians will be data rich before they are economically rich. They must be empowered to use their data for their own benefit. For example, I must have access to a secure mechanism to share my financial information with a personal finance application such that I may easily track my spending and get intelligent recommendations on where to invest.

Progress in the area of data sharing is evident as in February 2017, the Digital Locker Framework was proposed as a national standard for aggregation. Along with it, an Electronic Consent Framework for enabling consent for sharing of data has also been released.

Yet, what about the vast amounts of personal data that have already been collected under various legal frameworks? Under new norms, individuals can be empowered by being given an option to “opt-out.” Where this is not feasible, the law should favour the rights of the individual, placing the higher onus on the data collector.

Individuals have Rights over their Data

When consent models were first implemented in the 1980s, data was largely static in nature. The opposite is true today with data being tracked, processed, and correlated in a multitude of forms, from the trends of our online shopping choices to the timing of our financial transactions. This transformation calls for a move away from the antiquated “consent-based model” to a “rights-based model” for data protection. The proposed rights model can be guided by three principles: accountability, autonomy, and security. Together these principles will ensure that individuals are provided a right to fair treatment, right to information, right against processing, and right to the security of his/her data. For additional information on the rights-based model, the Takshashila Institution has released a Discussion Document on this very paradigm.

The White Paper stays away from the word ‘ownership’ completely and instead opts to create rights which are always with the individual. The individual has a right to each piece of data that relates to her, and she can exercise this right to accomplish everything all that she needs.  The data controller does not have any rights to this data other than those granted by the individual.  We (iSPIRT) need to come to a conclusion as to whether this language is sufficient from our perspective.

Data controllers must be accountable

Data controllers are typically organisations (including non-profits, governments) and hence much more powerful than individuals. While consent is important from an empowerment standpoint, we are also aware of the practical shortcomings of this approach. Many users do not or can not know enough to make a truly ‘informed’ choice.  The data controller, on the other hand, has been entrusted this data by the user for a specific purpose – it is a very conscious act, and they must be held responsible for how this data is used.  This is a fiduciary responsibility, and the controller must keep the data secure, ensuring that the user does not come to any harm from their possession or handling of the data.

This accountability needs to be enabled and enforced by multi-dimensional checks & balances through an independent Data Protection Authority and appropriate adjudication process that will process dispute resolution when situations involving privacy harms have occurred.

Times of disruptive change require agile regulators

Successful businesses today must have the ability to evolve rapidly. Operating in this environment will require regulators to be agile and provide timely intervention. The law must also recognise that these changes are accelerating and that it will be impossible, at this time, to cover everything. Thus the law should empower regulators by providing a framework with a set of principles which are timeless, along with a mechanism that can change with the times and a context to provide suitable intervention.

Leveraging technology for enforcement

Data is no longer the imperative of a few industries, but fast becoming a utility across industries. Therefore, unlike other regulators for Savings, Lending, Banking or Telecom, the Data regulator will have to deal with at least 10,000x the number of entities.  Every company deals with the data of its employees, shareholders, customers, vendors, etc., which may fall under the supervision of this regulator.  In such an operating environment, it makes it imperative for the enforcement of the law on data to leverage modern technology tools to drive compliance, investigation, etc.

For example, the authority could create a technological framework for enforcement (such as data audits, logging, etc.) to minimise the effort required and only needs to regulate the exceptions or data breach notification could have the objective of helping mitigate the consequences of a breach and to serve as notice for an incident.

Balancing India’s needs for privacy, transparency, and development

Balance is a universal aspiration in all aspects of life and an essential requirement for smooth, sustained and predictable growth. If the balance between privacy and development is not maintained, we may end up with a scenario where an individual may not be able to use their personal data, sitting with one data controller (say tax authority) for a beneficial service from another authority (eg new loan). Similarly, the balance between privacy and transparency is also essential, especially for scenarios involving the utilisation of public resources i.e. a PDS shop refuses to provide details of beneficiary it services under the garb of privacy and is thus able to misuse the system to create ghost beneficiaries.

The law should encourage concepts such as anonymised open datasets and democratised access to other datasets that serve the public interest, paving the way for data to become a public good. The UK’s Biobank & RBI’s effort to create a Public Credit Registry are good examples of data becoming a public good.

There is also a need for balance in the efforts and action of the state and private organisation on surveillance and related activities. With newer technologies making access to data easier and cheaper, it becomes even more important to tread the path of balance more carefully. History has proven, time and again, how surveillance will be misused for personal benefit. Therefore, the law should explicitly call out principles to prevent misuse of surveillance.

In addition, the new law must harmonise various existing laws, particularly, the Information Technology Act, 2000, Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, and Right to Information Act, 2005, which directly or indirectly touch upon the issue of data protection.

Overall, the law should strive to create a balance between protecting personal privacy, providing transparency and accountability for institutions (including government), and ensuring development, growth, and empowerment for the individual and other market participants.

Innovations: Trust Score & Consent Dashboard

It is refreshing to see the White Paper bring out new concepts for consideration like the Trust Score and Consent Dashboard.

The innovation of a Trust Score could also provide a means to empower users by assigning every data controller a score based on the robustness of their data protection and data use practices. At a minimum, this would create a red-flag in the mind of the user, versus the black-box that users currently manage, prior to sharing personal information.

Having said that, the actual design of the Trust Score will be critical. It is easy to understand that the score will punish past incidents of data misuse, but we must also decide what behaviour to reward. Should the score be decided by a centralized authority or through decentralized feedback from end-users, audit agencies, etc.? iSPIRT welcomes views on designing such a Trust Score.

A Consent Dashboard could help individuals easily view to which organisations they have provided consent to process their personal information and how that information has been used.

The Consent Collector entity, part of MeitY’s Electronic Consent Framework, may be extended to perform the function of a Consent Dashboard. Through the consent dashboard, businesses may capture and log user consent, provide users with the ability to see what data has been collected, give users the ability to revoke their consent and erase their data, be able to notify users in a timely manner in the event of a data breach, and most importantly give users the ability to easily port their data to another data controller.

The Consent Dashboard could be designed in a manner such that it only generates and tracks an individual’s consent for collection and sharing of data. However, the data could be directly sent from the Data Provider to the Data Controller (and Data Processor) without passing through the Consent Dashboard. In this way, the Consent Dashboard could just be a registered entity, not a regulated entity, and be maintained by a third party instead of the government.

Next Steps

We request your thought/comments on the principles above, and in helping to add/subtract to the list. The final principles will guide and inform iSPIRT’s response to the Sri Krishna Committee White Paper. If you wish to engage more deeply on this topic of Data Empowerment & Protection and help us frame the response, please let us know by reaching out at community@ispirt.in. The feedback submission on the White Paper is Jan. 31st 2018, thus we request all responses by Jan. 20th 2018 to receive consideration.

Update : We have submitted our response. You can find it on this link.

This post has been co-authored by Shrikant Karwa and Sarika Mendu.

New Year Greetings from Product Nation

We are happy to present the iSPIRT Volunteer Handbook.

The volunteer model that underpins iSPIRT has been around since 2009. Every three years we write about our volunteer model so that others can learn from it and build their own volunteer networks.

There are many kinds of volunteer networks. iSPIRT is a volunteer network that builds public goods. Therefore we take inspiration from Linux, Wikipedia, and others. Over the years we have found that no two volunteer networks are alike. Each has its own personality, its own way of resolving disputes and driving excellence. In fact, we find that heterogeneity across volunteer networks is increasing. At the same time, they are becoming more homogenous on the inside. Keep this in mind when you look to replicate some of the practices and values of iSPIRT in your own volunteer network.

In contrast to our 2014 update, this time our self-reflection about the volunteer model is in the form of a Volunteer Handbook. By explaining the inner workings of iSPIRT more clearly, we hope to make our current and future volunteers more effective. We are always looking for high-quality volunteers. In case you’re interested in volunteering, please reach out to one of the existing volunteers or write to us at community@iSPIRT.in.

The handbook can be accessed below

iSPIRT works to transform India into a hub for new generation software products, by addressing crucial government policy, creating market catalysts, building societal platforms, and assisting product entrepreneurs evolve into the next role. It’s a think-tank with an emphasis on following up our ideas with great execution. This is where you come in.

Over the past 2 years, we’ve developed the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) as the final layer of the India Stack. The DEPA empowers users with freedom and choice to actualize their data in a way that benefits them.

This includes a new technology for managing user consent and for authorizing data flows, as well as a new federated architecture for efficiently sharing user data from multiple data sources to multiple destinations (referred to as the digital locker framework). Banks and other big institutions are now beginning to deploy DEPA tools to enable consented data sharing by users. You can deep dive into DEPA here 

Volunteer Challenge

In alignment with RBI’s NBFC-AA Directive, we wish to develop a reference data architecture for Banks and NBFCs based on DEPA so that they can introduce new products and services to accelerate Financial Inclusion in India.

You will help develop, design and evangelize this new architecture with anyone and everyone in the market. If the job description seems vague, it is because this is uncharted territory and largely, you will decide where the work takes you. What we promise you is a world-class support system and a platform to actualize those ideas.

iSPIRT also has room for a lot of other volunteers with a variety of skillsets. Even if your expertise is not technology, but want to contribute to the mission with your unique skills, do fill the form below.

Why Volunteer

Our volunteers pay-forward for a variety of reasons.  Some do it for iSPIRT’s mission and cause. Others, find self-actualization in building public goods. Yet others do it to be in the company of world-class techies and entrepreneurs. You can learn more about iSPIRT from its Intro Presentation and its 2017 Annual Letter.

We’d be happy to discuss what is in your future, and how volunteering with iSPIRT can get you closer to that goal. Though, we have found that many of our volunteers have gone on to unexpected pathways, as they kept an open mind through the journey.

Location

Preferably, Bangalore

How To Apply

Interested? Please fill out this simple Google form and we shall get back to you: 

The Product Market Fit or PMF in short is one of the first holy grails that every entrepreneur strives to achieve. The second Holy Grail is also another “P” – Profits, which I will deal with in a blog post later.

I will share my learnings of what constitutes a Product Market Fit for an Enterprise Healthcare product, based on my journey of building HealthMacro’s DiagSmart product that is focused towards Diagnostics Labs and Radiology Centers.

I have travelled across 5-6 states spanning several cities, meeting hundreds of Diagnostic & Radiology Lab owners to come to this understanding.

An ideal product-market fit has the following characteristics:

Timeline : Usually for an enterprise product, it does take time (somewhere from 1.5 yrs to 2 years) to achieve a market fit after the product launch. Once one has achieved this, it means the following.

1. Strong understanding of customer needs, budget and value chain : Once you meet a customer, you know where he/she fits in the Price Chain. You have deep knowledge of his customers, his competition, his pain areas, his revenues, and his annual budget.
2. Acceptable across multiple segments : Usually we build the first product with more features, and then realize customers do not want all or are not willing to pay for all features. So you segment it. Segment it based on # of users or # of features to make it affordable for a wide market. We segmented it as DiagSmart Mini (lower end) to Basic (Value Product) with Enterprise and DiagSmart Premium models for top end customers. Each model has differentiating values based on the price customer is willing to pay.
3. Strong understanding of your competitors’ strength and weakness: Deep knowledge of your competitor’s strength and weakness, w.r.t Features and pricing is key. You need to respect your competitor as you still discuss with customer why they will benefit from your offering. In one instance, we had to segment the Product as a DiagSmart Mini to fend off competition with a lower price range model.
4. Acceptable across regions: In a country like ours, where there are no healthcare standards, in every region there will be local players who will have dominated the market with their product. Selling in newer regions and winning there is one important trait. For our lab product, adherence to existing NABL lab format reports was the key to driving acceptance.
5. Clear Value Proposition: Your demo should do the work of showing how financially beneficial the product is to the prospect. You do not explain much. User experience is key here. Ensuring a flawless demo, where various customer stakeholders (owner, lab staff, Finance, Front desk…) finds their needs met is key in the demo meeting.

Your rate chart should explain the cost in a simple manner and the customer chooses what he needs based on his budget.

Other Guidelines to ensure Successful Product Market Fit :

Single Code Base : Once you allow a customization for a particular customer, it no longer remains a product. It becomes a project.  You end up with multiple versions, resulting in larger teams to maintain it.

Hence, a single code base is critical. There should be options turn on/off certain features/customizations, based on customer budget/needs.

You take inputs from the customer to the product, and based on the value to the product, you decide to add it to road map or not.   All customers have one code base.

Customer Care : You have a efficient Customer Care or Post-Sales Support team to take care of all their needs, with a clearly tracked process. Customers know how to reach you and what to expect as turnaround time.

You should be able to support new cities/regions without having a local office/support center.

Strong Engagement : Customers get monthly newsletters informing them of the progress of the product and the company. They respond with their feedback, inputs.

Strong Testimonials and Referrals : You should start getting strong testimonials from customers explaining how your product or Service has helped them. They do not hesitate to recommend you.

Water tight agreement with customers : You have strong water tight agreements with customers protecting your business. There are clear descriptions of services, costs and timelines, termination clauses leaving nothing open ended.

Clear mapping of the entire Business Process : All processes Pre-Sales, Sales, Sales to Engineering handoff, Customer On-boarding process, Customer Care process are clearly defined. All process are documented, clear training plans when you hire new folks. All members follow same process.

In summary, you lead the customer/prospect overall in all aspects of business. You are not dependent on few customers for their inputs/business. Customers respect you and trust you.

That’s when you have achieved “The Product Market Fit…”

Article by – Shashi Bhushan, HealthMacro

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi

When I was invited to attend Niti Aayog’s event held recently with our Honourable Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, for a two-day focussed discussion on creating ideas for a ‘New India by 2022,’ I wasn’t entirely sure as to what to expect. But, I went with an open mind and armed myself with a presentation.

Well, I couldn’t be more surprised. The event had an overwhelming participation from some of the leading figures in the tech-corporate world in India, cabinet ministers and secretaries, all brought together with one intent – to enable ‘Change.’

Enough has been written and spoken about the event on social media and news channels alike. I’m writing this post to list down some of my own observations on how I foresee things changing in India from a business point of view:

• Domestic market will come-of-age: I grew up in India in a small town of Punjab called Moga. Like many other people in my time, I grew up wanting to do something for my country, but career prospects took me outside. I returned to India 14 years ago to create a global product company and eventually realising the “Make in India” dream from Bangalore. Although, most of our opportunities still came from other markets. With the Indian government rewiring the regulatory and policy framework and through its other related initiatives, things are set to change. Besides creating an environment that will ease up doing business here, the domestic market will open-up substantially with opportunities stemming from some of the major sectors of Indian economy such as agriculture, small and medium businesses (SMBs), energy, infrastructure and mobility – all focussed on improving efficiency and raising productivity. The increased focus on sustainable and inclusive development will also present opportunities to come up with solutions that will help address some of the more fundamental problems namely sanitation, affordable housing and such.

• Technology will be the key driver for India’s transformation: Digital India will get real. The speed at which people have adopted tech-applications has been remarkable, its impact profound. Cashless transaction is just the beginning, technology will redefine the way businesses are conducted across sectors. Agriculture will get more connected and farmers will get unique IDs thus enabling credit scoring for loans and classification for subsidies, energy metering will get smarter, and Indian SMBs will drive demand for enterprise software. Technology will play a key role in driving opportunities across all these sectors. The rise in tech-prevalence will bring down the adoption barriers significantly. This will further lead to more opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with solutions that are unique to the Indian market.

• Prepare for global competition and collaboration in the home turf: All this will make India an attractive destination for domestic and international players alike – giving rise to competition and as well as opportunities for collaboration. To make most of this opportunity in the coming years, entrepreneurs in India need to start thinking scale.

This is where the Indian tech-community gets to play a key role. We need to leverage the power of its collective experience in conquering global markets and its understanding of the Indian markets, merge them and arrive at a playbook (figuratively speaking) on building a sustainable and a scalable business in India. This will require conscious efforts towards build leadership, training executive talent and sharing best practices in this area.

Unless we achieve excellence in executing at scale, we will not be able to make most of the opportunities that change will bring with itself in India.

The Indian tech industry evolved from being predominantly services oriented to taking ownership of building products from scratch. Despite several flaws and hurdles in the system, it has made an indelible mark on the world map.

The new India is going to present exciting opportunities. I’m confident, Indian entrepreneurs will win as they will be prepared, stay focused and execute at scale.

Above all they are ready to be the ‘Change.’

Since conception, the India Stack has always been presented as having 4 layers. The first 3, paperless, presence-less and cashless, would essentially combat the price of doing transactions. Whether government to consumer or business to consumer, these layers significantly drive down the cost of interacting with your end consumer. With reduced cost, came increased access. Sachetization of services was possible, and we started seeing more and more businesses target India-2 and India-3, making them data rich.

Slide Showing the 4 layers of the India Stack

The 4th layer, that was nicknamed the “consent layer” was different, and hasn’t received much attention thus far. Unlike, the other 3 layers, it does not seek to drive down the cost of delivering services, but is a tool to, as Nandan Nilekani puts it, “invert the data”. That means that it allows the user to assert ownership over the data, and exercise certain choices in how it is used. The Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture (DEPA) brings us closer to achieving a Data Democracy, where the user can share his data with service providers. The slides attached here, present iSPIRT’s outlook on what DEPA is, what it does and most importantly, how does it empower the user.

Before we get into details of Data Empowerment, it is useful to acknowledge that Data is not a homogeneous commodity. There is a hierarchy within Data, and not all forms of Data can be treated equally.

The five types of Data that needs regulation

In the table above, as we go from left to right, data goes from more intimate, to more public. Even in today’s muddled regulatory framework around Data, non-shareable data such as biometrics, or passwords is seen as user-owned and a big no-no to share. But as we move towards the right, where ownership of the user ends, and that of the Data Controller begins, is murky at best.

Second, as you go reverse from right to left, the data becomes more individualistic. Anonymous Datasets, and Public Datasets are clearly about group data, whereas the rest are coupled with one or more individuals. Generated Data on e-commerce marketplaces, for example, may involve 3 or even 4 parties. Non-shareable data is typically intimate to a single user

Everything that we talk about in this post or the slides that follow, focus on the shareable middle of this chart, highlighted in yellow. At a principle level, we assert that any data, that has an individual identifier to it, is co-owned by every individual whose identifier is present in the data set. This may not give you complete rights over your data, but it gives you two rights, that DEPA enshrines in technology.

The first right, is that you can ask for access to your data from the data provider where this data originated, in a machine-readable format. The second right, is to share with user consent, your personal, generated or derived data with any other service provider you wish. To be clear, this is a right to consented sharing, and not consented collection. The right to what data is collected is a tricky issue, and requires policy, legal & regulatory clarity, before we can build tools to protect it. But we believe that the right for a user to claim stake on collected, generated or derived data about themselves has clear legal and moral precedent.

DEPA engages with Consent to Collect, not Consent to Share

How do we enshrine these rights in technology? The Electronic Data Consent. But before we introduce the hero, I’d like to get into a little back story to set the stage.

When UIDAI first issued Aadhaar cards, it noticed that despite it’s portable, digital nature, people used Aadhaar cards as Proof of Identity in the same way they used other IDs, through self-attested photocopies. Most of the time, these photocopies would not contain the explicit purpose of why they were photocopied. These photocopies were impossible to manage, and inadvertently some bad actors would steal say PAN or Aadhaar xeroxes, and use them as paper identity documents for fraudulent transactions.

So the UIDAI launched eKYC. The premise was simple, UIDAI could authenticate the identity of the individual. Combined with explicit consent of the user to share their data, the encrypted data would go directly to the service provider, digitally signed from UIDAI. This copy of the KYC document was safer, more trustworthy as well as faster and cheaper.

So the basic equation became :

The eKYC equation

But this thinking was pretty powerful, and the MeitY decided to abstract it and create the Digital Locker Ecosystem. Where instead of only one source of truth (UIDAI), any government or private entity can become an issuer of documents. Authentication was also abstracted and need not be tied to Aadhaar. You could retrieve marksheets linked to your roll number, or mobile bills linked to your mobile number. This lead to the following equation :

The Digital Locker System Equation

If you’ve been following this so far, you’ll realize there’s a pretty big missing piece in these equations so far. The “User Consent to Share” bit doesn’t seem to have the same sort of granularity as the other two parts of the equation. Consent is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. By forcing consent into a binary, data providers reduce their offerings to a “take it” or “leave it” choice. This is a meaningless choice for the consumer.

To really capture user intent, we must expand our understanding of consent. We must try to capture the granularity of the customer’s intent to consent. Does the customer consent to sharing of his data forever or for a limited period of time? Does the customer consent to further downstream sharing of the data, or does he not want his data to leave the service provider? This is where the hero we mentioned earlier enters.

Sample Flows of Data and Consent under EDC

Introducing Electronic Data Consent (EDC). It is a mechanism to abstract consent flows, from data flows. Which means, that you can capture the user’s intent to consent in bits, digitally signed by the user for authenticity, and share it with other providers to retrieve user data seamlessly.

Flowing through the pipes of EDC is an open, extensible XML file called the Consent Artefact. The Consent Artefact has some pretty cool features. It captures all the parties involved in the transaction, it explicitly states what data is being shared and for how long. There are options for the user to decide if the data consumer is allowed storage and further sharing of this data. Also, all parties are immediately notified to any updates in the consent and all changes are logged. This facilitates data audits, not just for regulators, but also to enhance trust between Data Providers and Consumers, and unlock the data economy.

The Consent Artefact enables differential privacy measures such as Virtual Data Rooms. For e.g., a lending startup could know if your income in the bank account matches the one on your salary slip, without having to hand over your entire financial transaction history from your bank to the NBFC. It can just raise a query to your bank “Is income > x?”, and get a simple yes/no in return. The Consent Artefact’s logging and notice, can enable newer ways of pricing and doing business on data. The Consent Artefact deserves another post just for itself, and you will get one, in the next couple of weeks.

But to summarize, the EDC abstracts consent flows, from data flows. It allows for collection, management and audit of granular consent to share data in an open XML file called the Consent Artefact. Now, time for the big question. So What?

Well, today you can open a Bank Account instantly with eKYC. You can get your bank statements on a digital locker without lifting a finger, if the bank is enrolled as an issuer on a digital locker. But to get a personalized flow-based loan, you need EDC. Electronic consent unlocks the value of your data sitting in multiple databases of multiple service providers and gives you granular control over who gets to see what. Together these 3 tools give us a stack for Consented Data Sharing that we call Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture. DEPA opens up whole new models for Privacy Protection and Auditing Data flows while keeping the user in the center. More tools will be added to this Architecture that encourage the unlocking of value in disparate data sources, such as the healthcare combiner.

The 3 Tools that make up DEPA. Upcoming tools such as the Health Record Combiner will be introduced in another blog post.

We believe that the 4th layer of the India Stack is the most critical. While the other 3 were useful operationally, the consent layer is useful strategically. It forces you to think about how best to align Data for the empowerment of the user. By opening up the data, it removes all monopoly value attached to the Data, whilst still retaining the inherent value of the Data. Innovation moves away from who can hoard the most user Data, to who can make the best use of the Data for the user.

If you’re curious to see EDC in action, please do have a look at the talk by Sanjay Jain & team here. The slides used in that talk are shared here.