After years of deliberation, planning, coordination, legislation and recruitment, a highly anticipated new Cabinet-level agency, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, was approved by the Legislative Yuan in December last year and is to be formally established and start operations next month.
Officially, the ministry is tasked with covering five sectors: information, telecommunications, media communications, cybersecurity and the Internet.
Part of the new ministry’s responsibility is the establishment of digital infrastructure to support policy areas, including information security protection, wireless and broadband communications, and the digitization of government.
However, its most important mission is to bring to bear the full might and resources of a Cabinet-level agency to advocate, advance and facilitate the development of industry segments in which Taiwan is generally considered to be less competitive globally. These are data, information technology services, software, media content and digital content.
Focusing on the data industry, the idea that it is the “21st century’s oil” has become widely accepted. In the digital economy, user data and content can be exploited to enhance the efficiency of day-to-day operations. This is evident in that four of the world’s five most valuable companies by market capitalization heavily exploit user data to improve the quality of their products and services, and to increase their competitiveness.
In Taiwan, the concept of a “data economy” has been prevalent since President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) first term in office. For the past couple of years, the government has made some effort to facilitate a data economy, including by promulgating personal privacy protection regulations, opening up government-owned non-personal data, developing data de-identification technologies, and standardizing formats and protocols for data sharing.
However, the cumulative progress so far has not been as impressive as expected, despite vibrant data analytics and the constant emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups.
A major thrust in a data economy is enabling multiple data sources to be aggregated to fully extract their collective value.
However, in Taiwan it is difficult to share data from disparate sources, if not impossible. The main obstacle is not data privacy, but ownership protection. When the owner of a data set agrees to share it, how their ownership rights and interests are protected is not clearly defined.
As a result, even though everyone agrees that the National Health Insurance database is a treasure trove for novel biomedical applications, no such commercial exploitation is possible because its owner, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, insists that the database be accessible only by authorized personnel who are on site, never over a network.
To take the data sharing challenge one step further, consider multiple hospitals that are contemplating whether to contribute their own medical record databases to a global pool for commercial application.
They have two main concerns:
First, how to retain ownership of the data and ensure that their database is not stolen.
Second, how to fairly estimate the contributions of their database to the outcomes of the cooperative effort to calculate profit distribution.
In the past few years, “federated learning” technology — also known as collaborative learning — has been touted as a solution to address the first concern. In reality, it is a partial solution at best, because it only ensures that a data set never physically leaves its owner, but does not prevent an adversary from stealing it by training an AI model and piggybacking part of it onto the AI model, which is eventually sent out.
This method of stealing data has been successfully demonstrated — it is not merely a theoretical threat.
As for the second concern, the situation is even more grim, as no practical solutions have emerged.
To enable more pervasive data sharing and collaboration, which would help accelerate the development of Taiwan’s data economy, the digital affairs ministry should make the best of the fresh political capital associated with being a new agency and develop a government-backed data sharing platform that effectively addresses the two concerns, perhaps using some combination of technological solutions and statutory protections.
Chiueh Tzi-cker is an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University.
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