Sun Lilin believes that the biggest value of blockchain is to solve the most fundamental clearing and settlement problem, turning multi-level data custody into a distributed and high-efficiency system; the privacy computing market will appear similar to a government-licensed license model.
Written by: Si Linwei
The new crown epidemic has caused a great impact on the entire society. Technological tools have penetrated into every corner of life, and the boundary between public and private spaces is becoming blurred. Social issues related to personal privacy have emerged one after another. For example, facial recognition can be used to enter the community, real estate companies use facial recognition to classify customers, and some apps even know their interests better than users… Does the ubiquitous camera make people safer, or At the expense of privacy, people are in a dilemma.
While transferring personal information to maintain public safety, how can privacy and personal data not be abused? How to solve the potential safety hazards and the distribution of commercial benefits?
Professor Shi Zhan of the China Foreign Affairs University mentioned a term in his book “Broken Cocoon”—privacy computing. “All data should be on your own terminal. Personal data entering the algorithm is a bit like entering a small black box. Technically, it can ensure that the various calculation processes of the data are encrypted. No one knows this. What is the data, it can only give feedback of a calculation result.” Shi Zhan believes, “Once I promise that my privacy can be used by you, and in what way is used by you, then I should get dividends.” He believes, The definitions of personal rights and property rights that we are familiar with in the past may all be iterated, and various new rules will emerge.
What exactly is privacy computing? For big data composed of personal information, how should the responsibilities and rights of individuals, companies, and governments be allocated? Jiemian News interviewed Sun Lilin, the founder and CEO of Matrix Yuan. Sun Lilin is a founding member and deputy director of the Technical Committee of Chinaledger, and a member of the Financial Technology Committee of the China Securities Fund Association. He has long been engaged in the work of payment and settlement financial infrastructure, and has a deep understanding and rich experience in how blockchain traditionally transforms the financial industry and information transmission.
Matrix Yuan, established in 2014, happens to position itself as a provider of privacy computing and blockchain technology, and its goal is to solve data security and privacy protection issues in the process of data collaborative computing in the digital age. Matrix Yuan received a 150 million yuan investment from Wanxiang Holdings in 2016, and has in-depth cooperation with Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Wuhan University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other university research institutions. Just last month, the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission announced that Shanghai Zhenfang Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Matrix Yuan, was approved as the “Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Privacy and Secure Computing Enterprise” and “Shanghai Distributed Privacy Artificial Intelligence Technology Innovation” Center” notice.
In Sun Lilin’s view, the data itself is a result calculated by multiple parties, and the ownership of the data is really difficult to define. The biggest value of the blockchain is to solve the most fundamental clearing and settlement problem, turning multi-level data custody into a distributed and efficient system. As a factor market, data must not be controlled by any single institution or platform. In the privacy computing market, a model similar to government-authorized licenses will appear in the future.
The following is an interview record, with certain deletions.
Sun Lilin, CEO of Matrix Yuan
How to ensure that technology holders will not abuse our private information
Reporter: Can you explain in simpler words, what is data?
Sun Lilin: Ackoff (1989) proposed a famous model—DIKW model, where D refers to data, I refers to information, K refers to knowledge, and W refers to wisdom (Wisdom). In this model, the bottom layer is data, the top layer is information, then knowledge, and the top layer is wisdom. This is the original way of human understanding.
Data is actually the process of interaction between humans and the external world, and then humans abstract information from it, then abstract knowledge from the information, and finally sublimate to wisdom.
Data is embodied in the service or generated in the service process, and is a carrier that runs through the entire service process. Simply put, the objective observation and recording of everything and behavior is data, so people are independent of data.
Reporter: Many communities now require face recognition to enter, so many people have to go to the community to store facial information. Generally, when people enter an office building, they only need to register personal information including their ID number and phone number. Do you think this method is reasonable?
Sun Lilin: This does involve a good example of privacy. In the case of ID card registration in an office building, this reflects the relationship between the visitor and the property manager. As a private domain, an office building has the right and the motive to protect its space, that is, it is forbidden to enter the office. This right is justified. But the question is who this right belongs to: the owner of the property, the manager of the property, or the leased company.
But the next question is how to ensure the security of information when sharing information between them.
Reporter: After I provide personal information at the front desk, does the corresponding company have the ability or obligation to protect my privacy?
Sun Lilin: It does not necessarily have the ability, and currently does not think it is obliged to do so.
Now everyone has reached a tacit agreement that the property management party has the power to decide who can enter the space, not the leasing company. Because while the property management party has power, it has corresponding obligations and responsibilities to bear risks.
But most properties do not have this ability to do it, nor do they have enough motivation to protect the information security of visitors, because its main motivation is to protect his private space.
When we enter an office building and register information, we have a contractual relationship with the property. This is not only a deterrent, but also a statistics. If something goes wrong, the property can find the corresponding personnel.
But what generally happens now is that the property does not have another promise: I will not use your information for other things.
As a result, information leakage inevitably occurs frequently.
Reporter: Is it possible for technology, especially blockchain, to improve the problem of information leakage?
Sun Lilin: Technical means can solve this problem to a considerable extent, replacing or becoming the infrastructure of public governance in human society.
But when technology completely sinks into a new paradigm for public infrastructure, it solves some of the problems, but it also brings a deeper problem: who will master the technology.
In fact, we completely disclosed the rights to the so-called technology holders. But how do we ensure that technology holders will not completely abuse our private information? How do we ensure that big platforms like Ali and Tencent will not use our data without authorization?
Data is calculated by multiple parties, and its ownership is difficult to define
Reporter: What exactly does privacy computing mean? Can privacy really be protected?
Sun Lilin: Regarding privacy computing, the first word I used when creating matrix elements was collaborative computing. The essence of collaborative computing is human collaboration.
The fundamental paradigm shift in data computing is more profound than the financial paradigm shift. Data computing transfers a large number of calculations and a large number of transactions from the centralized cloud to the edge, to individuals and institutions, so that we have more capabilities to process calculations, and at the same time greatly reduce the threshold.
For example, the privacy computing product Rosetta, whose slogan is to allow people who do not understand cryptography to use cryptography technology. And the AI products we make are available to people who don’t understand AI. So, in fact, what the matrix element really needs to do is to make the data available to people without data.
Privacy computing solutions are now particularly suitable for use in the medical field. I used to think very radically that the case information belongs to the patient, not to the hospital. Later I found that this was wrong. why? The patient is the subject of illness. If there is no doctor’s knowledge to bless my body, the patient would not know what illness was.
The patient cannot write a case. The patient only knows that I have a cold and a runny nose, because I have knowledge of colds. But suppose there are other more serious diseases that the patient does not know, and can only be known by the doctor through the equipment test.
Therefore, most of the data mentioned today is the result of calculation, and this calculation is the cost of others, including equipment, manpower, and so on.
Therefore, the data itself is a result calculated by multiple parties, and the ownership of the data is really difficult to define.
Reporter: What role can blockchain play in the division of data ownership?
Sun Lilin: Data is public, and data computing is essentially multi-party computing. This also applies to private computing.
The greatest value of the blockchain is to solve the most fundamental clearing and settlement problem, from multi-level isolated data custody to a consistent, distributed, and efficient investment.
Reporter: Some experts pointed out that the essence of blockchain is an open ledger. Is there a contradiction between its openness and privacy protection?
Sun Lilin: Privacy computing and blockchain are products of two dimensions, and two tools that cooperate with each other.
The blockchain itself is not encrypted. Bitcoin only uses hash signatures, and its encryption is not even as good as some high-grade mobile phones. The connection between blockchain and private computing is that it only provides clearing capabilities for private computing. This part of privacy processing is basically local.
The game of interests between institutions constitutes a business model
Reporter: If blockchain is a public infrastructure, what role can companies like Matrix Yuan play in privacy computing?
Sun Lilin: There is a particularly classic saying that rights that have not been awakened are not rights. When I didn’t realize that this was my right, I didn’t care if this right was taken away. Because the right to privacy produces benefits after being effective, people will wake up in the face of benefits and protect their privacy rights.
After people awaken in the face of interests, this matter becomes very critical. Therefore, when designing the business model of Matrix Element, I think that 2C (for consumers) privacy protection will only constitute moral pressure for a long time, not a business model. Only information protection between institutions constitutes a business model.
The game of interests among institutions constitutes a business model. Because the institution will be the first to realize the value of its asset, and the institution has sufficient volume. However, the benefits that can be realized by the individual are too small, and the individual does not constitute a game equivalent entity, and there is no model.
Reporter: So, do 2B business and 2C business have nothing to do or promote each other?
Sun Lilin: 2C is a catalyst. China’s past 2C business development has a default premise: its material supply is unlimited, such as shared bicycles, bicycles can be produced infinitely; such as Meituan takeaway, restaurants can be unlimited supply, the larger the restaurant opens, the more people eat , The cheaper the supply chain. Under the premise of unlimited supply, the scale can be expanded.
In today’s blockchain industry, the vast majority of people only regard it as a 2C application, not as an infrastructure.
The situation in the field of infrastructure is the opposite of the situation on the C-side. All infrastructure businesses have limited supply. For example, the more electricity you use, the more expensive your electricity bill, and the more cars you run on the highway, the more expensive your tolls will be. The same is true for blockchain, and Ethereum is a typical example. The more people are used, the higher the gas fee.
The reason for this situation is that the infrastructure is subject to natural restrictions, and the public infrastructure of all mankind can only provide so many services.
Returning to the financial sector, the supply of liquidation capabilities of the liquidation layer is limited, not infinite as everyone imagined, so when Double Eleven occurs, many consumers’ shopping carts cannot be emptied in time. Even if you stack a lot of hardware servers, optimize the database, and increase TPS (transactions per second), I’m sorry, the clearing capacity of the UnionPay clearing library is limited.
As the infrastructure of UnionPay, the improvement of payment performance is staged and limited. The iterative update of applications far exceeds that of infrastructure, and the cycle of iterative evolution of infrastructure is much longer than that of applications.
And infrastructure means the need for supervision. Before the large-scale rise of e-commerce, the Internet only had HTTP protocol; when e-commerce payment became popular, Https and SSL protocols were available. And only when SSL and HTTPS are supervised can humans be trusted. The essence of all human transactions is trust.
From a global perspective today, if data is considered to be a factor market, then the factor market must not be controlled by any single institution or platform, no matter which technology giant it is.
Therefore, I think the business model of privacy computing has also returned to the era when China was building telecom operators more than 20 years ago. There will be operators similar to those authorized by the government to operate and provide public infrastructure services.
Everyone can claim rights to the data they can control and process. But if we try to establish an exchange and sharing network, we cannot directly obtain the data and rights of other participants; all parties participating in the network must transfer part of their ownership and use rights of the data to a third party Operators, this network can only work.
For Matrix Element, we do not seek the status of an operator. We are committed to good technology and provide technical solutions for future large-scale data operators.
Reporter: What are you doing now?
Sun Lilin: We started to do privacy computing in early 2017. At that time, we just thought that this direction must be right, but the path is not clear. Until the new infrastructure became popular last year, I think the path is basically clear. At present, we have been able to have the basic technical capabilities to meet some basic needs and infrastructure for information exchange between enterprises.
Matrix element RosettaFlow privacy AI platform
Reporter: You worked for UnionPay before and entered the blockchain industry in 2013. Is the relationship between finance and blockchain mutually reinforcing or replacing?
Sun Lilin: Blockchain is naturally financial infrastructure, and Satoshi Nakamoto expressed this in his Bitcoin paper. Ta wrote in the abstract that in the era of human online transactions, the problem of transaction backtracking and fraud is completely solved. The first thing to solve is the financial foundation. The most basic liquidation mechanism of the facility.
The essence of the blockchain is nothing more than a service middleware. It is transaction-oriented. The blockchain is actually just a hand and foot of human beings, helping humans to work.
The distributed AI privacy calculations that Matrix Yuan is engaged in are not transaction-oriented, but data-oriented. The goal of matrix elements is not to copy hands and feet, but to copy the brain. AI is divided into three levels: perception-cognition-decision-making. Today’s blockchain is still in the stage of perception. What Matrix Element has to do is to use the blockchain to gather massive amounts of data to provide help for human cognition and decision-making, and eventually become the “external brain”.
