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.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under