Technical Guide to Ocean Compute-to-Data

With the v2 Compute-to-Data release, Ocean Protocol provides a means to exchange data while preserving privacy. This guide explains Compute-to-Data without requiring deep technical know-how.

Private data is data that people or organizations keep to themselves. It can mean any personal, personally identifiable, medical, lifestyle, financial, sensitive or regulated information.

Benefits of Private Data. Private data can help research, leading to life-altering innovations in science and technology. For example, more data improves the predictive accuracy of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Private data is often considered the most valuable data because it’s so hard to get at, and using it can lead to potentially big payoffs.

Risks of Private Data. Sharing or selling private data comes with risk. What if you don’t get hired because of your private medical history? What if you are persecuted for private lifestyle choices? Large organizations that have massive datasets know their data is valuable — and potentially monetizable — but do not pursue the opportunity for risk of data escaping and the related liability.

Resolving the Tradeoff. There appears to be a tradeoff between benefits of using private data, and risks of exposing it. What if there was a way to get the benefits, while minimizing the risks? This is the idea behind Compute-to-Data: let the data stay on-premise, yet allow 3rd parties to run specific compute jobs on it to get useful analytics results like averaging or building an AI model. The analytics results help in science, technology, or business contexts; yet the compute is sufficiently “aggregating” or “anonymizing” that the privacy risk is minimized.

Share or Sell. Compute-to-Data is meant to be useful for data sharing in science or technology contexts. It’s also meant to be useful for selling private data, while preserving privacy. This might look like a paradox at first glance but it’s not! The private data isn’t directly sold; rather, specific access to it is sold, access “for compute eyes only” rather than human eyes. So Compute-to-Data in data marketplaces is an opportunity for companies to monetize their data assets.

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