Alex McDougall on data privacy and Bicameral Ventures portfolio

0:00I'm Ashley Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Alex MacDougall the chief investment officer of bicameral ventures Alex welcome to the show once again it is great to see you and thank you for being here absolutely third time is a charm as you mentioned this is going to be fun

0:20there's a lot of really interesting things going on today and that excited to talk about some of it definitely yeah the the markets are very crazy since we last spoke a lot of crazy economic events happening and pivots too many businesses if we could dive a little bit into bicameral ventures can you first start by giving a background on you know what industries have you been focused

0:43primarily on for investment with bicameral ventures sure so we formed bicameral about two years ago and started out really as a blockchain focused venture fund and we we came by that by my partner and I was really deep focused on this idea of digital integrity and digital trust and just how people trust interact with each other in general and one of our big points of our

1:07thesis is there's this trillion or multi trillion dollar trust gap that sort of evolved in the world by that's not being able to trust each other directly on transactions how they settle how they close how they get taxed how they get accounted for but more importantly everything that we do digitally and and all of the digital interactions that we have are all extremely heavily mediated

1:27and we we can no longer trust who's holding our data who owns our digital persona who's on the other side of a transaction why we're seeing certain content and really there's there's this massive lack of integrity in our in our in our essentially our digital system today and so we set a bed to to organize a venture capital fund around providing capital towards closing that trust gap

1:49that's really our big picture mandate an idea and so blockchain obviously great technology to do that but you know there's there's millions on blockchain today and to really tackle these gigantic problems of the world you need billions on it and the tech isn't there yet to do that today it's not infrastructural enough it's not smooth enough to do it doesn't have the

2:08components that need to be leveraged within it and it needs heavy integration with ái and IOT as well the other converged technologies that we think about and so really there's this these suite of connective solutions and this infrastructure are this stack type of investing all of which needs to happen to essentially create the solutions that make adoption of these types of integral

2:29trusts focused technologies a no-brainer instead of something where you need to actually make a choice and really understand the tech to make it work so that's really our one of our key mandates is is both from the investment side and now we're starting actually to get more into operating and starting a few of our own projects to start a little bit earlier in the story and find

2:48the users where they are today and then evolve a lot of that that trust and digital integrity back end into the technologies that already have a lot of users today so roundabout answer but bicameral does a lot of different things and really tries to organize capital around solving these big big big picture problems of the future Allen today yeah and that's great that you've got into it

3:10so early Alex because a lot of these things that you've been focusing on with bicameral are now more coming into the light now that the lockdown has moved everyone to virtual all the time a lot of in-person conferences are now being virtual and communications are all going through different service providers of different communications applications that you know nobody really reads the

3:34fine print of the Terms of Service when they when they start these applications they just click go and they're ready to go and just trust that their information is secure so with the corona virus pandemic happening has that affected your vision or at least the timeline of your vision for how all of this is playing out it's it's a it's a great question and I hate to describe anything

4:00about this endemic in this crisis as an opportunity but I think I think Snowden put it well and he did an interview with Vice recently where he said it's like the world has just a mental sabbatical for a little while where everybody can sort of stop and just activate some higher functions not be quite as busy a minute two minutes focused on what they're doing at every second and hyper

4:24scheduled and all of sort of the you know the autopilot that we go through our regular lifes on on a regular basis everybody's got a bit of time to be forced into just being quiet and thinking about paradigms for a little while and and you mentioned it Madonna way to physically connect with each other in general and oftentimes the the highest value interactions that we have

4:48are reserved for physical connections closing deals you're visiting with family romantic interactions those are all things that happen physically and we can't do those in actual physical spaces right now so all of the things that we're used to doing physically we're now being forced into doing virtually and those are the highest valued pieces of data about us and we have this kind of

5:10consumer data paradigm today that's massively based on extraction of our habits and our preferences and our digital personas and now we've just created the the highest value interactions for that data to be mined and so we're always on about and we're always talking about how we need to fix this this data paradigm for one of extraction to one of shared data and

5:33self sovereign data minimum data sharing requirements and and a whole bunch of other pieces to this next generation data economy that we're trying to build but essentially we weave it it's become exponentially more important in today's world than it ever has been before so we're it's really shined a light for a lot of people on on what's what some of

5:56these big challenges are and where it gets really interesting and important I always like to bring my business we're doing this over zoom right now and a lot of the challenges of zoom took off obviously when when this when this endemic started and a lot of the focus was on zooms not actually that private but most of the focus was around oh well your zoom can be zoom bombed and hacked

6:18and there was an article about if you're running a Mac and you have a password let's zoom they can actually access your rootkit through it what powers the host has but a lot of its around malicious intent and one of the biggest challenges with our with our data paradigm today is that it's not actually the malicious intent that really is is the challenge

6:36it's the fact that zooms whole business model is looking at what's on my screen looking where my attention is and building a data profile around me and you and everybody else who's looking and watching this and then monetizing that on the backend to advertisers and like that's all laid out in their privacy statement or privacy policy but that's yeah that's sort of the secondary point

6:56of this business and there's ways that you can use zoom there's ways that you can use most apps that are very private and very safe and very secure um but but if everybody does that then these apps don't exist there's this fundamental tension between privacy and profit and unless we fix that paradigm and fix the business models and actually create a new way for data companies and

7:18that companies to exist the more privacy we have either via legislation or via smart choices by consumers we're going to end up in a completely private and completely empty world of apps and in today's world where we only have these vehicles to communicate with each other that's a disaster mm-hmm yeah great point and for the everyday people that you know they aren't really focused on

7:41what's on the back end of their computers they're just using the applications they don't really care as long as it works you know this doesn't seem like it has been as an important topic as it could be or as it should be and usually the the privacy legislation are by you know the top level people putting in some mandate to protect them do you think that the people themselves

8:06should be speaking up about this and they could make a difference possibly and or do you think that they you know should more people start caring and bringing this up yeah so I mean a couple points here into your first point that that's exactly right and and I think about it in terms of people take the path of least resistance and it generally takes something shocking and

8:33very direct or a visceral change in situation to really actually change people's habits and so you know in in general world when things are kind of you know ongoing and you're going to work every day and you know your family and friends and then you Google Maps works great you you to get places bah-bah-bah you you know that some vaguely it's strange that

8:58McDonald's keeps showing up on your route even though you're not looking for it and that it happens to know where your house is but those things aren't really things that sort of jar you out of your paradigm what works now when you're in a koban world now and these things start popping up like a there's a there's a website that's based out of Singapore where you can see every

9:23single kovat case that's in Singapore click into it see that age of the person the nationality of the person their travel history where they live where their contact tracing is and this entire web and say okay that's good for kovat tracing purposes why the hell can i a random guy in Canada see that it those it's those extremely sort of in-your-face situations where you finally start to

9:52wake up a little bit and say okay well there's a there's a reason all this stuff is free in general and B there's this like ninety percent of the web that I'm just not seeing I see this very sanitized top 10 percent up here but there's all of the actual mechanics and plumbing that's sitting underneath it so I think you you you need sort of a catalyst for people to actually start

10:14paying attention but then it's also it's on us to to build different tools that actually make it easy for people to operate in a better paradigm so right now you know I'm obviously passionate about this stuff and so I try and use the right tools and I try and protect my privacy right but like my web material my web experience is materially worse than if I use Google and Facebook and

10:37Instagram and house-party and all of like the the premiere tools that are out there right now yeah I mean like DuckDuckGo I love everything that they do but the search results that I get from them are objectively worse than Google so it's up to us as well to build it better data paradigms and I think the secret weapon is you know it seems daunting to take down Google on but you

10:57can build a better data profile than what Google has about you in ten minutes if you you can access your Facebook data you can access your LinkedIn day you can access your Google data you can access your mobility data you can add in your own health data you can know your own preferences we can create our own digital persona and then that's what we end up leveraging to advertisers to

11:19governments to healthcare to covet apps but we share what we want and we share what actually it needs to be shared on it but that that infrastructure doesn't exist today I mean we're involved in a couple of really cool companies one of which I think you want to talk about a little bit more and that that is creating that infrastructure but it needs to be as simple and is used as

11:37performance as Google is if we're going to get not the millions sort of avant-garde neo privacy hackers that they care about this stuff we want to get grandma to use it because it just gives her better recommendations and that's when we can really win and change this paradigm and it's doable because the profile you create when you're creating your own profile the shared

11:57data profile is way better than the extracted data profile and that's something I'm confident and consistent on and we just need the mechanisms to make it easy for users to do that's great and that you touched on one of my camels portfolio companies which I was going to get into next meta me and focus on building your black box of your personal information your data and be

12:20able to push that out to you know providers and service riders when you're using that service but only allow them to see the information that that you provide to them now how big do you see you know with a with a project like meta mean how big do you see the industry numbers-wise growing is this something that could be a global product quickly or do you

12:43really need for example the coronavirus or some other events to really bring privacy to the forefront of people's minds to allow products like this to flourish for their investment yeah it's a great point and a great question and I think what's what's great about meta me and and what what also is sort of a just such a big picture is that the vision for it is so big I mean it's essentially

13:08you know all of the pieces of how the data economy work today from the architecture of the third-party tracking from how people how the actual back back-office data marketplace works how bidding and real-time advertising works out cookies were like all of that that sort of hidden architecture is essentially what's attempting to be rebuilt via this this platform of meta

13:31mean so there's a lot of different pieces to it but you're exactly right and I mean so setting COBIT aside for a second I mean the consumer data market is trillion plus dollars between all the the major players on it and all the advertising dollars that flow through and that's really what what can be taken down and if you can build something and it's not just meta me there's there's a

13:53suite of products and solutions that are doing this it's it's never gonna be one company that sort of solves solves the paradigm and but if you can I mean Google is the most valuable one of the most valuable companies in the world right now because it offers you instead of a 1% chance that somebody clicks on your ad buys your product with Google it's a two

14:13and a half percent chance and just that Delta is the most valuable thing that exists and so those those are made up numbers not exactly right but if you can with a better profile get that two three and a half percent and then filter in through all of the mechanisms that already exists on the back end so all the real-time dating all that stuff's automated you can essentially roll up

14:32the market overnight okay it's you don't need each individual consumer to go and change and do all that stuff there's a lot of automated infrastructure that if you can put your product in the right place to essentially take advantage of distribution network that's out there already you can roll it up overnight so yes this this is able to become a gigantic style of platform in a very

14:54short period of time because of the nature of the performant data that's being created under it and we're so starved from an economics perspective for consumer insights predictability advertising works fraud resistance all of that stuff even again setting aside Kovan for now that anything that he thick and moved the needle a little bit becomes instantly the most valuable

15:15platform that exists and then add in the koban side where we we have essentially two terrible options right now we either have the the China model which is ultimate surveillance download this app we're forcing you to show barcodes wherever you go that govern our mobility or the the current Americans system is a little bit more more non technologically enabled to say that

15:41lightly Canada same idea and by the other Google and Apple solution which is opt-in so you don't even have the sweeping range of a forced government style of adoption for this type of technology but also you you end up giving your health data to the worst data stewards that we have so far apples a little bit better but you sort of end up with with the the tech leading

16:08solution is a bad outcome and may not even be an effective outcome if enough people don't opt-in and you know the totalitarian or ultimate surveillance state regime is also a bad outcome so we're in a situation where we desperately need sort of this middle lane which is something that's run and owned and operated and encouraged by governments but that has this sort of

16:32privacy technology built-in that's only sharing the minimum amount only certifying that you're you have a low kovat risk and not without all the details behind it this idea of a minimum share platform and and then that a lot of that stuff's backed up by blockchain that you can trust that data you don't need to validate the underlying data because you

16:51can see the supply chain and know where it came from so there's a whole bunch of different pieces to that but it does need these catalysts and some of it can be commercialization but some of it can be I'm a global pandemic and again it's sad to say that that's an opportunity but if that's what breaks this data paradigm into one of minimum sharing private execution environments self

17:12sovereignty 360 degree data collection about yourself global bla then you know that's that's a that's a good outcome of all of this carnage that were living through mmm-hmm yeah very interesting and for the people that are looking to learn more about privacy and protecting their own data what ways do you suggest and we're running out of time a little

17:34bit but if you could give some takeaways for the audience on are there ways right now that they can get certain applications or use certain methods to help protect their data online yes absolutely and a brief plug for myself I'm going to be do long form deep dive into all this stuff at consensus distributed on May 11th called data hygiene 101 who owns your

17:56digital persona when you don't that really goes through in depth a lot of these tools and and how to use them how to see what's actually being governed about you or discovered about you and then how to protect yourself on it so essentially I mean the short version I'll run through a couple of tools quick there's a fantastic app for iPhones called lockdown and that essentially

18:17instead of there's a lot of apps that block trackers for browsers so I mean the brave browsers gecko is good ghostery is pretty good but there's very little that actually goes into the apps that are used on your smartphone as well so lockdown sort of reaches into your entire OS and blocks the even if you don't block it or turn off some of the data sharing features it goes in and

18:37blocks and turns off some of those data sharing features so that's that's super helpful and very informative about what's being blocked and where and but so there's there's lots of ways to shutdown where is really interesting is the ways to catalyze and use the existing data so there's a really cool platform called login it that is a Chrome extension that essentially takes

19:00all of your browsing data and then runs the same style of infrastructure sodium data management platforms demand-side platforms as Google and the advertising networks except it does it as an agent of you so it goes out and monetizes your data on your behalf it's not changing the paradigm but at least it's putting you in the flow of it and understanding

19:20how the value works and all that stuff so that's a really cool one as well digi me is an interesting smartphone platform as well similar type of idea that you accumulate a bunch of your own data and then use those act data packages to power apps within that world so there's a there's sort of a few different pieces to that but I mean the general privacy

19:40ones from just cutting off your data today ghostery brave browser those are probably the two best login hood for your phone and they are sorry lockdown for your phone and then login hood did you me and meta me for creating this new version of paradigm and last thing accent no we both got to get to go see Tim Draper the there's a really really really

20:07enlightening web site called click click click click and I won't say too much more about it but there was sort of my rabbit hole moments when I realized that there's a whole different world out there and this is one of the best simplest easiest most entertaining and terrifying ways to dive into that world of what's actually happening when you go to a web site so I'll leave it I'll

20:31leave it at that for anybody wants yeah very interesting Alex thank you for all those resources and you've got me hooked I'm definitely going to be looking at click click click right after this so thank you so much for taking the time to come on the interview I will leave the links to bicameral and your talk with consensus in the description box below

20:49as well as the resources that you provided and let's follow up in the near future thank you so much amazing thanks Ashton always a pleasure we'll talk soon