World Cybercrime Index – Where are the cybercriminals hiding?

World Cybercrime Index – Where are the cybercriminals hiding?
Russia leads the list of countries that host cybercrime, followed by Ukraine, China, the USA, Nigeria and Romania, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. The findings come from anonymous questionnaires completed by ninety-two cybercrime experts. The researchers say this survey approach overcomes a major challenge in investigating cybercrime - the anonymity of perpetrators who conceal their identities online.  Dr Miranda Bruce, from the University of Oxford and New South Wales in Canberra is lead author and is on show. 

What is your data worth and can you use it like money?
“It’s where the future goes to be born”. That's one of the ways to describe Web Summit. It's a series of events around the globe that brings together some of the biggest names in tech. Over 34,000 attendees have just taken part in Web Summit Rio. Our own Angelica Mari sat down with Drumwave CEO and co-founder Andre Vellozo to discuss the infrastructures that will enable us to trade with our own data.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ghislaine Boddington.

More on this week's stories:
World Cybercrime Index
Drumwave

Chapters

• 4:08 World Cybercrime Index
• 19:39 My data as currency

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, this is Gareth. Welcome along to Somewhere on Earth. It is Tuesday the 23rd of April 2024. We're in London and we have voices from Australia and Brazil. 

00:00:18 Gareth Mitchell 

And we have a voice from the other side of the table because Ghislaine Boddington is here, expert commentator, as I live and breathe. Good to see you again, Ghislaine. How are you? 

00:00:25 Ghislaine Boddington 

Very good, actually, yes. And it's the first time we've seen each other since our Digital Planet reunion isn't, yeah. 

00:00:32 Gareth Mitchell 

So it is. That's right. The last time we were emotionally saying farewell and having hugs outside that wine bar at quite late at night as we went for our taxis. Yeah, that was a lovely evening, though. 

00:00:39 Ghislaine Boddington 

That was true. Yep, Yep. Yep. It was. It was very special. And and any other listeners today who who came along, because they’re longterm Digital Planet listeners too as well as now Somewhere on Earth. 

00:00:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes. 

00:00:53 Ghislaine Boddington 

Thanks a lot for being there. It was a really special group of people. 

00:00:56 Gareth Mitchell 

It meant a lot. My goodness. Yeah. And again, there's. I always like to explain this to newer Somewhere on Earth listeners, that we were, some of us on this team I think pretty much all of us came from a programme called Digital Planet. It's where we go on about it a little bit. We had a reunion and it's just just really really touching there are people who were sufficiently attached to a radio show. 

00:01:17 Gareth Mitchell 

That's not been on air for a year. Still to come along the night before a four-day bank holiday and be there and be supportive and be lovely and come along and have a chat and so on. People had flown in from other countries as well, from the United States, from Germany and elsewhere. 

00:01:20 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah, yeah. 

00:01:32 Gareth Mitchell 

That's where it's like, wow, how humbling. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, that was last, of course, that was the last time we saw each other get in. Yeah. And it was a good old laugh as well. We had a nice time. And so what else? As we have our little chit chatty bit, to ease ourselves into the podcast. I've always interested in what you've been up to, what you've been thinking about, what your gossip is.  

00:01:37 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, it was. 

00:01:52 Gareth Mitchell 

So what do you have this time and get then? 

00:01:55 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, actually I think it was a week after that I was involved in a special Ted X which was at my university University of Greenwich, which is the third one they've done. But I was hosting this one and, and we did it at a virtual production studio with this amazing screen. Slightly curved. Yeah. On which they were projecting fantastic scenarios or scenographies 

00:02:20 Ghislaine Boddington 

or, you know, made-up of evolving animations and moving pictures, some of them coming through game engine, into play, yeah, behind each of the speakers or for their TEDx inputs. 

00:02:32 Gareth Mitchell 

So kind of generative you mean then, so 

00:02:34 Ghislaine Boddington 

It was fixed. It was pre produced, but it was generative in its own way. So like a tree that was growing and little stars coming out in the sky very, very simply illustrative, not literal, but illustrative of the speaker, but not distracting from the speaker. In fact kind of surrounding them. 

00:02:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. 

00:02:52 Ghislaine Boddington 

And it was a very special experience. And you know, the audience loved it. And I think it was probably a first TEDx to use this kind of, you know, virtual production methodologies of today that places like Target 3D are producing. So yeah, it was a really interesting event to host. 

00:03:12 Gareth Mitchell 

That sounds lovely. We didn't have anything quite that fancy at our DP reunion. Did we really? Very inadequate there, but nonetheless, well, what a lovely example of stuff that you've been up to. Thanks Ghislaine. Here we go. 

00:03:15 Ghislaine Boddington 

No, it was bit the opposite. 

00:03:29 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:03:33 Gareth Mitchell 

We'll tell you about the world's top cyber crime hotspot. Now this is thanks to a new study that's surveyed a whole load of experts to home in on the countries that harbour the most cyber crime. So what kinds of crime are we talking about. 

00:03:47 Gareth Mitchell 

And why does the list matter? How might it help? Speaking of top experts, plenty of them were to be found at the recent Rio Web Summit. It's one of the big gatherings on the annual tech calendar, and we have a report. It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:04:07 Gareth Mitchell 

Now Russia tops the list when it comes to the countries that host cyber crime. Next on that list are Ukraine, China, the USA, Nigeria and Romania, and the UK is pretty high up on that list as well. So reports an international team of researchers. The data comes from questionnaires completed anonymously by 92 cybercrime experts. 

00:04:30 Gareth Mitchell 

The researchers say that this study approach gets over one of the biggest challenges when you're looking into this sort of thing because by their nature, those who are up to the bad stuff online, they're pretty hard to trace and to identify. Concealing themselves with proxy servers and the like. So they're pretty invisible. Now. I've been hearing more about the study and its results from  

00:04:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Dr Miranda Bruce, postgraduate fellow at the University of Oxford, and she's also at the University of NSW, Canberra. We began by discussing how Miranda and her colleagues went about researching the topic. 

00:05:05 Miranda Bruce 

Up till now, we've been able to collect a lot of data about victims and we've been able to map where victims are, especially at the national level. We've also been able to collect data on the kinds of attacks that happen and the underground marketplaces that cybercriminals operate in. All these things, they're sometimes a little bit hard to find. 

00:05:25 Miranda Bruce 

But in general, very easy to kind of relatively easy to collect all of this information. One thing that has really been missing from the data on cybercrime as a global phenomenon is where cybercrime is actually coming from. So where the cyber crime offenders are physically, geographically located. 

00:05:44 Miranda Bruce 

And so one of the big motivations behind this was to be able to map cyber crime itself and we wanted to do that because we wanted to help lift the veil of anonymity around these offenders. But we were actually also really one of the core kind of academic motivations behind this was to have 

00:06:03 Miranda Bruce 

a better understanding about cyber crime and how it operates as a type of crime. So this index is part of a larger project, the CRIMGOV project, which looks into organised crime across the world. All different types of organised crime. 

00:06:15 Miranda Bruce 

And so the index is part of that project on sort of theorising crime in a different way. And so the way that we're theorising cyber crime in this project is to say that cyber crime is not this huge global fluid sort of anonymous person in a hoodie in any basement  

00:06:35 Miranda Bruce 

Across the world kind of phenomenon. It actually has a very local dimension to it. 

00:06:41 Gareth Mitchell 

Your approach has been to go to cyber criminal experts, and then survey them about their views on where the cyber criminals are. Is that it? 

00:06:49 Miranda Bruce 

That is exactly correct. The thing about cyber crime and cyber crime offenders is that it's impossible to figure out where all of them are. Right. Finding any population in a in a kind of scientific, academic way, being able to figure out and like the entire all of the members of the population is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. And that's especially the case with people who are 

00:07:10 Miranda Bruce 

part of illicit activity. So the in the in the, in academia, they're referred to as a hidden population. So what we need, because we can't actually figure out where cyber criminals are in a way that's reliable with things like technical data, we can't really, we can't actually trace 

00:07:30 Miranda Bruce 

where all the cyber criminal activity is coming from, because they can hide where that activity is coming from. That's one of the things they’re really good at. So we need a proxy. 

00:07:39 Miranda Bruce 

And what that means is that we need another kind of data set that's as close to the data set that we're after as possible. 

00:07:47 Miranda Bruce 

And so the thing, the data that we have access to that is as close as possible to the location of cyber crime offenders is the data that these experts have on the location of cyber crime offenders. And the thing about the thing about these experts, is that they 

00:08:05 Miranda Bruce 

are, in some senses almost just as hard to find and track down and get them to respond to emails as cyber crime offenders are. They're really hard because their job is to be anonymous. Their job is to hide themselves so that they can find these people. So tracking these people down and getting them to do the survey, very difficult. 

00:08:25 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes. And so one of the things you did wasn't it is you got them to rank different countries across three different measures in terms of the impact of cyber crime in those countries and other things. So what were you asking these Cyber Crime experts? 

00:08:41 Miranda Bruce 

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that we designed this survey is, first of all, we defined 5 major types of cyber crime ,and that was technical products and services, attacks and extortion, data and identity theft, scams and cashing out and money laundering. And there are different types of cyber crime that fit into all of those 5 categories. So what our experts did 

00:09:04 Miranda Bruce 

is when they open the survey, we define those categories for them and then we went through each category one by one and we asked the experts to nominate up to five countries that they believed were the most significant sources of cyber crime. Now importantly, one of the big things about the survey is that it really hinges on the expertise of our participants. 

00:09:25 Miranda Bruce 

So to keep the data as high quality as possible, it was, the experts didn't have to nominate 5 countries if they weren't absolutely sure that they could think of or thought that there were five countries that were significant sources. 

00:09:40 Miranda Bruce 

So they could update, nominate up to five. Or they could even skip an entire category. For example, if they felt like they weren't expert enough in cashing out and money laundering schemes, they didn't have to nominate any countries in there. So that was a really important part of the survey design was to ensure that experts were only talking about the 

00:09:59 Miranda Bruce 

categories that they're actually expert in, which is another reason why we can really rely on this data and use it as a global metric. The second thing that they did was for each of the countries they nominated, let's say they only nominated 1 country. 

00:10:13 Miranda Bruce 

The UK. Then in the next page they looked at the UK and we asked them to rate that country. So we weren't, they at no point where they ranked, they were just asked to rate that country according to these three measures. So the first measure, as you say, was we asked them to think about the impact of the cyber crimes that are produced in that country. 

00:10:33 Miranda Bruce 

And then we asked them to rate the skills of the cyber criminals that operate there. So we asked about the professional skill of the cyber criminals and the technical skill of the cyber criminals. And so basically they rate it on a scale of one to 10 

00:10:50 Miranda Bruce 

for every single country that they nominated through all of the categories, and that was it. And that's the data that we used to generate the index. 

00:10:59 Gareth Mitchell 

So what did you find then? What would you say that were the big headline findings? 

00:11:02 Miranda Bruce 

So the big headline findings? Um. The top ten countries that are in the index, they're probably not that surprising, but the really surprising thing. And one of the reasons I'm so glad that we did this project. 

00:11:16 Miranda Bruce 

Is that there are far more than 10 countries, so often you'll see if you look up top ten cyber crime hotspots, you'll find endless cyber security blogs and even reports from law enforcement agencies and government agencies that list the top ten, maybe the top 15 countries that produce cybercrime, but never do they sort of publish 

00:11:36 Miranda Bruce 

how exactly they put this data together. But our study found 97 different countries that were nominated as cyber crime hotspots. So our understanding of cyber crime and what which countries actually produce a lot of cyber crime. 

00:11:51 Miranda Bruce 

Now we can look at a much bigger picture and that's really, really important for understanding not only how cyber crime works in a kind of academic sense, or even in a law enforcement sense, but it also gives us way more avenues of research and investigation and intervention into different countries  

00:12:11 Miranda Bruce 

that probably wouldn't have been considered significant cyber crime hotspots by anybody other than these experts, who don't share that data because they can't or won't, and the people and the law enforcement agencies living in that country. 

00:12:27 Miranda Bruce 

So that's the that's really for me. The big thing is that we actually have way more to look at when we're thinking about cyber crime and geography. 

00:12:38 Gareth Mitchell 

That's Miranda Bruce. So listening intently to that Ghislaine Boddington, and it raises all kinds of questions, doesn't it, this cyber crime list? What was some of the stuff that most jumped out at you, Ghislaine, from this research? 

00:12:54 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, I think it's very interesting why some countries have cybercrime hotspots. And we report, you know, she's very clear, Miranda. But she's got more to do. Yeah, more, more research to do. And I was wondering about the skills base and the fact that actually, of course, for many people working with coding, with hacking of various kinds, there's a lot of self-taught  

00:13:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Exactly. It's very much an initial research, yeah. 

00:13:21 Ghislaine Boddington 

stuff going on now people. You know, people get down to it, don't they? They spend hours and they learn how to do this and if they can’t  

00:13:28 Ghislaine Boddington 

use those skills, those self-taught skills or whether they've been through education for it, you know, Technical College or whatever within their own country to do a real job, like cybersecurity. The the other side of cyber crime. Then maybe that's why they end up becoming cyber criminals. 

00:13:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Or maybe if there are jobs, but they're just not that particularly well paid. So you're super bright, you've got loads of talent and coding, perhaps you don't know how to do a whole lot of other stuff. 

00:13:56 Gareth Mitchell 

You are going to think you'll follow the money, quite possibly I would say you like as in like everyone would do, but you anyway, I think your point is very well made. You can see the temptations there and it might say a little bit about what would get some of these countries high up on the list. Because you've heard about different ways, haven't you Ghislaine, about like initiatives to retrain people to harness the talent so that it doesn't go to the dark side. 

00:14:20 Ghislaine Boddington 

Now this has been in debate for a while. The fact that you know, it's two sides of the same coin. It's cyber criminal, cyber security expert. Yeah, really has a kind of choice to go one way or the other. And there was an initiative which was 

00:14:35 Ghislaine Boddington 

near Manchester. It was called I think it was called the Hacker(s) House. It may still be going, but anyway they were working with young cyber criminals who'd been kind of caught out like in their bedrooms, you know, doing naughty things like trying to break into bank security and trying to break into corporate companies, being caught by the police. But they were retraining them, helping them 

00:14:56 Ghislaine Boddington 

to actually kind of move from the dark side to the light side. So in other words, you know well, you've you've learned a lot doing your cyber criminal activities. You've obviously got a good brain for this, but you could use it 

00:14:57 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh. 

00:15:06 Ghislaine Boddington 

in cybersecurity and we'll help you retrain and get a good job in cybersecurity because we need you to be expert in that because we need this expertise. So I'm wondering whether that, I mean that's, you know, a very interesting initiative. Yeah. 

00:15:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. And then then you can go home and tell your parents what you actually do do for your day job without them kicking you out of the family. 

00:15:25 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yes. 

00:15:29 Ghislaine Boddington 

Although of course we never know. Maybe there's cyber security experts who do their very good day jobs. They go home in the evenings and play around with cyber crime. You never know. Yeah, but interesting that there is a whole new industry which is coming from those two angles and that there's a lot of money, a lot of money being spent on it all and lost on it. Yeah. 

00:15:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Who knows what they get up to? Yeah, all right. 

00:15:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it really is. 

00:15:49 Ghislaine Boddington 

So. 

00:15:50 Gareth Mitchell 

Now, spoiler alert, next week we're going to be talking about passwords, which is very much about what we can do. Obviously at the individual level to secure our bank accounts or our 

00:16:01 Gareth Mitchell 

web, mail or whatever it might be, but one of the things that's concerning you Ghislaine this week, especially in this whole context of cyber crime, is that more of the corporate level, isn't it? You know, in other words we can probably do as much as we want to with our passwords and our own individual cyber security, but that don't necessarily make us completely cyber safe. 

00:16:18 Ghislaine Boddington 

No, it's that, it's that part cause I'm not a cybersecurity expert or cyber crime expert, but I am, I do know a lot about data and identity and therefore that it, theft of that which is very personal, very individual and very upsetting. Yeah. 

00:16:33 Ghislaine Boddington 

And you're right. You know, however much we do on securing ourselves quite often these, these these attacks, yeah, are on companies who are storing our information, whether it's health information, whether it's your, the payroll information, cloud providers, etcetera. 

00:16:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Cloud provider or something that you subscribe to? Yeah. 

00:16:53 Ghislaine Boddington 

And they get attacked, and if they don't pay the ransom, they haven't got the right security in place, so they get attacked. They they don't pay the ransom or they get behind, get muddled up, etcetera. Personal data is revealed, and that could 

00:17:05 Ghislaine Boddington 

be my personal data that is revealed, and then what do I do? What do I do, because the company is not going to look after me. My personal data is out there, so I wonder what the?  I'm really wondering what the root ways and pathways are to actually, you know, support your own digital identity. But once it's in someone else's,  

00:17:27 Ghislaine Boddington 

No, big corporates data, big data. Then what happens? 

00:17:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And and how are you covered then you know? So if you just trust one of these companies with a load of your data and then a load of that stuff ends up on the dark web and you suffer material or psychological loss as a result, what the heck.   

00:17:46 Ghislaine Boddington 

And it is, I I know someone it's happened to and it is very, very upsetting because identity loss, 

00:17:51 Ghislaine Boddington 

you know, even if it is just data, it's no longer just your e-mail and your your date of birth. We know that. There's a lot more detailed information and health information, particularly gets very upsetting. So I mean, there is website, there’s this website nomoreransom where you can you can go to to check whether you know, 

00:18:03 

Hmm. 

00:18:11 Ghislaine Boddington 

if you've if you've been caught yourself individually, but that still doesn't deal with, you're, you suddenly hear on the radio. Yeah, that you're health trust has been hacked and that your data therefore is out there. 

00:18:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Then what? Yeah. So. OK. So nomoreransom.org is a place to go to, is a useful resource. Yeah. 

00:18:24 Ghislaine Boddington 

You just. I don't. There's no protection. 

00:18:30 Ghislaine Boddington 

To go if you've if you've personally been got a ransomware attack, but maybe some listeners might come in with some ideas for us next week. Yeah, yeah. 

00:18:34 

OK. 

00:18:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, let's hope. Let us know, dear listeners, you probably know our socials by now, and I'm sure you have our WhatsApp programmed into your phone and you may be a listener in one of the 110 countries from which people listen to this podcast. According to our most recent data, across 1289 cities.  

00:18:52 Gareth Mitchell 

And I think I'll qualify that, we think that probably this data when it says city it means probably conurbation of some sort and I'm not sure necessarily if they yeah exactly there are literally nearly 1300 places as big as LA where people listen but you may get the idea but we know that we have listeners in the likes of Guatemala City, in Salford and the UK and in Nashville Tennessee. 

00:19:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

Wonderful.  

00:19:13 Gareth Mitchell 

So cool. Good. Glad you're there, folks. Thanks for being there. 

00:19:15 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah. 

00:19:17 Gareth Mitchell 

All right now. It's where the future goes to be born. That's one way that the Web summit has been described. Now, this is a roster of events around the world, attracting the most influential players in the world of technology. More than 34,000 people have just gathered at Web Summit Rio. One of them was our very own. 

00:19:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Angelica Mari. 

00:19:41 Angelica Mari 

So we're here at Web Summit Rio. Over 30,000 people from all over the world came to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to discuss the future, and especially how technology impacts people's lives. And I'm here with Andre Vellozo, CEO at Drumwave. And we're going to talk about data ownership. Welcome to Somewhere on Earth, Andre. 

00:20:03 Andre Vellozo 

Thank you, Angelica. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here with you guys. 

00:20:08 Angelica Mari 

Tell us a little bit about your company Drumwave and what does your business model have to do with this whole thing of empowering individuals to have control of that data? 

00:20:22 Andre Vellozo 

Drumwave is a US based company. It was born in the US. 

00:20:26 Angelica Mari 

I was born in the US, right? 

00:20:26 Andre Vellozo 

Yes. 

00:20:28 Andre Vellozo 

But it has a a lot of, yeah, they a lot of Brazilian. Yeah, tonnes of Brazilian DNA. And we have played by different rules to allow this company to to to be born and to thrive. 

00:20:29 Angelica Mari 

It has Brazilian blood, right? 

00:20:42 Andre Vellozo 

The vision of the company is to give you autonomy of your data. 

00:20:48 Angelica Mari 

You you came up with some interesting uh concepts in the in your product stack, you've come up with a concept of a data wallet and even data savings accounts. Can you unpack this for us and how does that differ from another digital wallet solution? 

00:21:08 Andre Vellozo 

When you think about data right and and the rails that we have now in the world, you have the logistics for goods and services pretty much figured out. So we can have like this bottle of water on the table, products being transported all over the world. We use trucks, ships, aeroplanes, roads. We have logistics for stuff. 

00:21:30 Andre Vellozo 

And we also have logistics for the money. So you have the banks, central banks, POS, credit cards, you can use money to exchange value for value because you have the logistics for that. So when you think about data and the fact that everything that you do generates value, the data.  The rails for the data it doesn't exist. 

00:21:53 Andre Vellozo 

So. imagine when you go buy water or coffee in a coffee shop, 

00:21:57 Andre Vellozo 

you can get the coffee and you can pay for the coffee, but as you do that, you're generating like 6 packages of data, packages coming from your phone, from your payment method, from your consumer behaviour, tonnes of data and this data is being it's a positive externality that is not captured by anyone, right, but it's part of your life. 

00:22:18 Angelica Mari 

And how how does that wallet operate? 

00:22:20 Andre Vellozo 

So the wallet are the rails in the infrastructure, so it's a bunch of APIs that allows you to in every touch point to capture the specific data from this transaction. 

00:22:31 Angelica Mari 

So APIs being the plumbing between all of these interfaces. 

00:22:35 Andre Vellozo 

Between between two very simple things. Like the the the reason you can use payment system is because you have credit cards, you have bank accounts and you have gateways. 

00:22:46 Angelica Mari 

And these things have to talk to each other. 

00:22:49 Andre Vellozo 

Exactly. So what we built, it's a version of the financial system inspired by the Brazilian system of payments that you can use data as part of the transaction. We call it the whole transaction. 

00:23:02 Angelica Mari 

How do any of us go about transacting with our own data? 

00:23:06 Andre Vellozo 

Imagine that you're, pretty soon we expect, right? Your your bank, your carrier or another kind of company that you have a direct relationship with, your bank is gonna go to you and he's gonna tell you, hey, Angelica, you trust me with the cost that you have your money for the last 20 years, would you trust me with the cost of the of your data? 

00:23:25 Andre Vellozo 

And then you're going to ask me, hey, what do you want to do with my data? And the bank is going to respond to you. Well, I'm not going to buy a motorcycle and have a road trip. Not gonna buy a an island in the Caribbean, but I'm going to do with your data the same thing I do with the money, I can figure. 

00:23:38 Angelica Mari 

And who would do the valuation of my data? 

00:23:42 Andre Vellozo 

The market gives the price valuation for data. It's it's something that we've been working for almost 10 years. If you remember back in, we're in Brazil, right? 

00:23:52 Andre Vellozo 

Do you remember URV? We got the URV idea and the math behind URV and we blended this with Claude Shannon’s information theory. Claude Shannon was a guy that has created binary code. Everything that exists digital was Claude’s work. 

00:24:08 Angelica Mari 

URV, just to make it clear for our listeners, it stands for. 

00:24:12 Andre Vellozo 

Yes. 

00:24:15 Angelica Mari 

Real Unit of Value of value. Yes. 

00:24:14 Andre Vellozo 

Which is the name of the currency. The Brazilian currency. 

00:24:18 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, it was the predecessor to the Brazilian Real, which is Brazil's currency. Would the value of my data change according to my life circumstances. 

00:24:22 Andre Vellozo 

Yes, exactly. 

00:24:28 Andre Vellozo 

Depending on the use case, depending on the moment, the value changes every day. 

00:24:33 Angelica Mari 

How far are we from getting to that scenario of a database transaction scenario? 

00:24:36 Andre Vellozo 

I think. 

00:24:39 Andre Vellozo 

Yeah. 

00:24:41 Andre Vellozo 

I think everybody agrees that the world is going to a data-driven economy to data economy. So far the way we think about it, most of it, it's a data marketplace, it's a marketplace of data sets, but that's not where I believe we are going to, because we already have a marketplace for data, plenty of companies, plenty of plumbing for that. And we have been buying and selling data since forever, nothing new there. 

00:25:07 Angelica Mari 

But everyday people are not getting paid for that. 

00:25:10 Andre Vellozo 

It's it's a different thing. It's a one use case. What I'm talking about, it's about a marketplace that is driven by data. We live now in a in a market moved by money. Everything is measured by money. Everything is going to become measured by data. So you can see that huge investments on infrastructure. 

00:25:31 Gareth Mitchell 

So that's Andre Vellozo, who is CEO at that company Drumwave. And this is very much on your turf, isn't it? This whole point about data ownership and, you know, just this whole kind of business model around Drumwave, what did you make of what you've just heard? 

00:25:50 Ghislaine Boddington 

There was a fascinating interview, actually, and I think.  I went to Drumwave’s website immediately to read a lot more about it and they've got this very interesting statement. They're they're saying that the most, the mostly free access to collect to our collective personal data will likely dry up by the late 2020s. And the concept of measuring to check the value of your data, which Angelica is talking about in that report,  

00:26:19 Ghislaine Boddington 

has become really important. How do we actually start to value data? And it, because it ,data has become the most single valuable commodity in the world. You know that thing and you know data is the new oil. You know that kind of statement. 

00:26:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Ohh yeah it it. It was much refuted though, wasn't it that particular analogy? 

00:26:36 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, it looks like it's going there. Yeah, it's going there and. 

00:26:36 Gareth Mitchell 

You know. 

00:26:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, but nonetheless a very important resource. Your point is very well made, right. 

00:26:42 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah. And I think, you know, even from Tim Cook in 2019, Apple, the Apple CEO, he, I mean Apple obviously are very careful with data, they're the one place that is in the main. But he's, he makes a statement which is basically saying,  

00:26:56 Ghislaine Boddington 

stop identifying information and using customers data. You know. If you're going to carry on to it, strip the identity completely and go towards synthetic data. Yeah, or just stop collecting it all together. Yeah, but. 

00:27:09 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. And so it's like synthetic data for training, like AI models and stuff like that. 

00:27:14 Ghislaine Boddington 

Yeah, but this is where it gets interesting, isn't it? Because data is the lifeblood of AI training. Yeah, so the same data that has our AI systems, 

00:27:23 Ghislaine Boddington 

we collectively produce it in droves, but in this discussion, the monetization and the monitoring and curation of that could be in our own hands. Yeah. If we are, if we owned our own data, which I think we will ultimately and there's a big shift towards it. Yeah. Web 3.0 is pointing towards that too. Yeah.  

00:27:42 Ghislaine Boddington 

But actually, if we owned our own data, we can become our own brokers. We don't need brokers, data brokers who are selling our data to companies to make products etcetera and then sell them back to us. We actually can trade with our own data and we can use it ourselves to find the products that we might be interested in through the connections that we allow our data to make. 

00:28:02 Ghislaine Boddington 

So it's about empowering the citizen to capitalise your own data because at the moment we can't use it ourselves. We can't even access it. We can't see what's happening to analyse it, yeah, so. 

00:28:12 Gareth Mitchell 

No, of course. And we we increasingly we are able to find out what data is being held. You know certainly through GDPR for instance, we can find out what companies are are holding which of our data, but it's still not exactly easy to access or as easy as it could be or even if it is easy to access it, in all fairness, then, what the heck do you do with it? Yeah. 

00:28:32 Ghislaine Boddington 

And how do you analyse and how do you go? Actually now I know that I'll actually set my data off to do this and this and collect that for me. Self-sovereign data is the phrase. 

00:28:41 Gareth Mitchell 

Ah OK Self-sovereign data. And I mean just finally and in say just in less than a minute if you can Ghislaine, what about examples of this self-sovereign data, you know things like different crypto wallets that you've been looking into. Is that like Binance Web 3.0  wallets? I think is one that you have in mind. 

00:28:56 Ghislaine Boddington 

Well, yeah, they they are. Yeah, they these are already examples of decentralised data points. So yes, by an answer for Web three wallet for crypto wallet and ontology with its decentralised crypto fund. 

00:29:08 Ghislaine Boddington 

But actually what's more interesting is things like data unions, which are enabling small companies to allow their users to share their data and get paid for it. And Streamer is actually a decentralised network which allows people to stream live media and real time data at scale. So they're they're emerging. There's lots of these different places all over the world. They're emerging. 

00:29:30 Ghislaine Boddington 

And I think Drumwave is one of those groups which is, which is why the interview was so interesting for me, yeah. 

00:29:35 Gareth Mitchell 

Absolutely so interesting that we have a bit more in our podcast extra, by the way. More from Andre and Angelica 

00:29:40 Gareth Mitchell 

at that web summit Rio. But that'll do for today. Let's do some quick credits for you. Let's just see who's behind the glass now. I think Keziah’s still around, but we've definitely, there are, we have Dylan on the desk there as well, doing a grand job. The production manager is Liz Tuohy. The expert commentator is Ghislaine Boddington. I don't usually credit myself, but I'm in the mood today. So I'm Gareth. 

00:30:01 Gareth Mitchell 

And the producer is and the producer is Ania Lichtarowicz, producer and editor I should say as well. Very very important. Thanks for listening and stay with us for the subscription extra, if you're a subscriber. Thanks folks. Bye. 

ENDS