New ways to trade data
Mar 28th 2018
IN 2016, according to Cisco, an American technology group, the volume of data flowing through the internet each month passed a zettabyte, enough to fill some 16bn 64GB iPhones. By 2025 it will be many times greater. Immeasurably more data sit outside the public internet on company servers. Most of these data are valuable information, which means that people are keen to trade it.
根据美国科技公司思科的数据，2016年，通过互联网传输的数据量每月超过1万亿字节，足以填满160亿个64 GB的iphone。到2025年，这个数目将会增加许多倍。在公司服务器上的公共互联网之外，还有更多的不计其数的数据。这些数据大部分都是有价值的信息，这意味着人们热衷于交易它。
Typically, data deals are at present worked out between someone holding the information and those who want to extract insights from it. For instance, Uber has deals allowing many cities to access data generated by its fleet of drivers. This helps city planners understand traffic flows.
通常，数据交易目前在掌握信息的人和想从中提取信息的人之间完成。 例如，优步有许多交易允许许多城市访问其车队所产生的数据。 这有助于城市规划者了解交通流量。
Such deals can be clunky to set up, however. They tend to concentrate on datasets that hold obvious value. They may also involve data physically moving between one computer and another, which makes it vulnerable to abuse, as in the recent scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data. New schemes, created as part of the crypto-currency boom, aim to change all that.
然而，这样的交易可能会很笨拙。他们倾向于专注于那些具有明显价值的数据集。它们还可能涉及到在一台电脑和另一台电脑之间移动的数据，这使得它很容易被滥用，就像最近围绕剑桥分析公司使用Facebook数据的丑闻一样。作为加密货币热潮的一部分，新计划旨在改变这一切。
One of these, called Fetch, was announced on March 28th. It was founded by Humayun Sheikh and Toby Simpson, respectively an investor in and early employee of DeepMind, a British artificial-intelligence company that is part of Alphabet. Instead of sending blobs of data around the internet, Fetch allows an organisation to ask questions about datasets residing on another organisation’s servers. The network will keep track of which datasets are used to answer these questions, allowing future queries to be directed to the right place automatically. A local weather-forecasting group, say, might have its algorithm tap into performance data from a power grid to improve its predictions (the frequency at which electricity moves in cables is related to the air temperature).
其中一个叫Fetch，是在3月28日宣布的。它的创始人是Humayun Sheikh和托比辛普森（Toby Simpson），他们分别是DeepMind的一名投资者和早期雇员，DeepMind是一家英国人工智能公司，隶属于Alphabet。Fetch不需要在因特网上发送数据块，而是允许组织对属于另一个组织服务器上的数据集提出问题。该网络将跟踪哪些数据集用于回答这些问题，从而使未来的查询能够自动地指向正确的位置。一个当地的天气预报小组可能会利用它的算法从一个电网中获取性能数据来改进它的预测（电缆的电流频率与空气温度有关）。
Fetch, which plans to launch itself in 2019, is a non-profit organisation and sees itself as a custodian of this question-and-answer network. Payments to ask questions will be made in the form of digital tokens. Unlike some make-a-buck crypto schemes, Fetch says that its tokens will not be available for public purchase until it is up and running, and has demonstrated its value. Fetch’s financial backer, Outlier Ventures, has bought future rights to these tokens rather than shares in the company. The idea is that as more organisations make their data searchable, and more people pay to ask questions with tokens, the value of the tokens will go up.
Fetch计划于2019年投入市场，它是一个非盈利组织，并将自己视为这个问答网络的托管者。问问题的付款将以数字代币的形式进行。与一些赚钱的加密方案不同，Fetch说它的代币在它启动和运行之前不会被公开购买，并且已经证明了它的价值。Fetch的财务支持者，局外人风险投资公司，已经购买了这些代币的未来权益，而不是公司的股票。他们的想法是，随着越来越多的组织使他们的数据可搜索，并且越来越多的人会使用代币来提问，代币的价值将会上升。
Another project, called IOTA, operates a similar scheme. Bosch, a German engineering giant, thinks that it could use IOTA to earn money from the data its domestic appliances generate. It has bought IOTA tokens through its venture-capital arm.
另一个叫做IOTA的项目也有类似的计划。德国工程巨头博世公司认为，它可以利用IOTA从其家用电器产生的数据中赚钱。它通过其风险投资部门购买了IOTA代币。
These new data markets face stiff challenges. Maintaining individual privacy and monitoring questions to prevent corporate leaks will be difficult. The cryptography securing the network needs to be airtight. Perhaps the biggest challenge will be convincing people to use them. The take-up of similar efforts, such as Solid, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Maidsafe, a Scottish data-sharing network, has been lacklustre. Nevertheless, Fetch says several large European firms are lined up to give it a go. And, like other digital currencies, IOTA’s token value has soared and fallen.
这些新的数据市场面临着严峻的挑战。维护个人隐私和监控问题以防止企业泄密将是困难的。保护网络的加密技术必须是无懈可击的。也许最大的挑战将是说服人们使用它们。类似的努力，如麻省理工学院开发的固体，以及苏格兰数据共享网络Maidsafe，都表现平平。尽管如此，Fetch说，几家大型欧洲公司都排起了队来试一试。而且，和其他数字货币一样，IOTA的象征性价值也在飙升和下降。
This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "Exchange value"
英文原文选自《经济学人》