By making data truly safe to use, we can bring great benefits to all users, TripleBlind CEO Riddhiman Das said.
If securely protected those data and algorithmic interactions will unlock significant value, because it is the epitome of a trustless system – you don’t have to worry about anyone misusing data because they simply can’t.
Before founding TripleBlind Mr. Riddhiman sold a biometrics company he developed to Ant Financial. Such solutions were an important component in improving financial inclusion for unbanked and underbanked people in Asia because they used biometric tools to prove the identities of people who could not be recognized through traditional means.
But the strategy only went so far, Mr. Riddhiman learned. Some participants did not trust companies, especially those from certain regions, to properly safeguard their information. Many countries also had privacy regulations that needed to be met. Other issues included identifying fraudsters who had moved to new countries and absorbing new fraud vectors into existing models.
If you could guarantee data would be kept private and only used for agreed purposes, you would be on to something.
“The problem of privacy was framed by technologists as one emerging from shared computing resources not regulatory privacy,” Mr. Riddhiman said.
At the time, there were no solutions to the problem and plenty of issues with the piecemeal solutions which did exist. Even in a public cloud you couldn’t control who rents form the same server. Because there wasn’t a solution Mr. Riddhiman set out to make one which allowed data to be used while still enforcing the terms that govern that data in a provable way.
Begin with comprehensive fraud enforcement. Most people do business with several different banks at one time but each of those institutions only have access to the sliver of financial activity associated with their product, how well can they protect their customer and themselves from fraud? With TripleBlind third-party data can be used while restriction on the use of that data are enforced via digital rights.
“Enabled by TripleBlind and ability to enforce privacy, the data economy in financial services and health care, can actually begin to happen,” Mr. Riddhiman said.
We are at the beginning of an era where people have more knowledge of how their data is being used and the value it brings. Jurisdictions like the European Union and California have introduced regulations governing its use. The individual producing that data should have control over when and how it is used, for example the scanning of bank statements to help manage spending habits.
“What TripleBlind enables is the sharing of that bank statement in a way that all of the data is there but the only operation that can be done on the data is the one I approved you for,” Mr. Riddhiman said. “This is a trustless data exchange between us. I didn’t have to trust you to keep my information private, you didn’t have to trust me to present legitimate data.”
While encryption normally involves the user receiving a means of decryption, TripleBlind eliminates the decryption step.
The last 15 months have been an interesting time for TripleBlind as more activity has come online, Mr. Riddhiman said. Thanks to the CCPA and GDPR more of us understand the importance of our data. Financial services firms now have to devote higher budgets to the problem and they in turn have taught customers through their efforts. Add in changing work patterns and it has accelerated digital transformation by as much as three years, he estimated.
As more jurisdictions introduce privacy regulations TripleBlind simply encodes that digital right on the data. Its system is trusted as the only one that is allowed to perform operations on European data from within the United States, Mr. Riddhiman said.
Walking down the path with this, as competitors see their data is truly safe, they will benefit from models that better generalize new data presented in the field, Mr. Riddhiman explained. It allows data to be instantly used before it becomes irrelevant and can eliminate factors like gender and racial bias.
“Anywhere AI is touching you want better generalizability,” Mr. Riddhiman said.
TripleBlind recently announced its partnership with Snowflake, a data cloud company, to empower joint customers to run TripleBlind’s API-driven virtual exchange solution that enables data owned by one enterprise to run specific operations on data owned by another enterprise, on Snowflake’s platform.
“Snowflake’s platform includes multiple features such as dynamic data masking and end-to-end encryption, leveraging sophisticated cloud security technology to secure data both in transit and at rest,” said Mr. Riddhiman. “TripleBlind’s private data sharing builds on this strong foundation by allowing the data consumer to analyze and generate insights from sensitive data without decrypting it. With these insights, financial institutions create more effective anti-money laundering initiatives and healthcare systems that improve the quality of their diagnoses through access to larger, more diverse data sets.”
When a data owner and data consumer agree to private data sharing on Snowflake’s platform, TripleBlind’s solution automatically de-identifies the data and ensures they never move outside the owner’s firewall. The data consumer can only perform operations on the data specifically allowed by the data owner and all computations occur in the encrypted space. TripleBlind’s API-driven virtual exchange keeps intellectual property in an algorithm safe from reverse engineering attempts, while Snowflake’s secure data sharing technology means that data is never required to be moved or copied and is up-to-date. TripleBlind’s platform is architected to natively support data sets stored in the Snowflake Data Cloud, which means customers can seamlessly integrate the solution within their instance.
“Snowflake’s platform enables secure data sharing and the enforcement of privacy regulations to be seamless in the Data Cloud,” said Todd Crosslin, Global Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Snowflake. “Our partnership with TripleBlind can give customers the ability to securely share data in a governed way across their organizations and with partners, vendors and customers, without ever needing to move or copy the data.”
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