AMA Livestream w/ IoTeX Founders February 11, 2020
Video
https://youtu.be/pSFE159pVM8
Winners:
TG ID: @akashking0, @IamRyan
Twitter ID:@FoodTalky, @Darknight2037, @maikimphuong1
Summary of the session:
Describe Ucam in a nutshell
Ucam is the first consumer product that you only pay once for when you buy this product all of the data that’s generated by it owned by you. Unlike the existing products that you need to pay for and also give all of your data and ultimately privacy back to the manufacturer, who then packages it up and sells to advertisers. We designed Ucam so that there’s no way for us to sell your data even if we wanted to, it’s all privacy-by-design, so the product is truly yours once you pay for it.
In IoTeX’s ecosystem how is the value of data reflected? How do data control and revenue rights ultimately return back to the user?
We believe that the user/device owner needs to take full ownership of the data and everything generated by these devices. In this model, the user will own the data backed by the blockchain. In the traditional industry, a company or the manufacturer will create an Internet identity for you and they will take ownership of the account so that they can easily access your data. In our scenario and design, not the manufacturer, company, or we issue the ID - it is issued by the blockchain {public and private key pair}, which will be encrypted by you. This is a revolutionary way to protect users’ ownership and all of the business models will be switched from business-driven to user-focused.
How does the world look like when consumers do own the data?
So a lot of people say, “Hey I have nothing to hide, why do I need privacy in my devices”? The reality is, even if you don’t have anything to hide, you can still make money off that data, that data is super valuable, you have all the control, and you can set-up some parameters and say Hey, I can give my Ucam data but Google needs to pay me $10 for that or whatever the price is. So even if you have nothing to hide, you can still get paid for your data and if you feel like it’s nobody’s business and you don’t want your data out there, you can make that decision for yourself and keep it for yourself.
Main advantages and differences of Ucam from other manufacturers and cameras besides the price. What makes this camera unique?
So we just got back from CES in January, we had a great time showing this product not only to buyers but also to manufacturers. Ucam has been developed in partnership with Tenvis - a very large security camera manufacturer, currently Amazon’s choice for security cameras. This is a multi-generational product at the hardware level but a first of its kind combination of hardware and software to enable all the privacy and security features that we are talking about. Similar to other cameras it has all these great features that you can see here, 1080p, motion detection, 360-degree coverage, two-way audio, and all the other features you would expect from a security camera these days but Tenvis came to us looking for the next big feature, which is privacy. We added things at the software and firmware level to enable end-to-end encryption, edge computing, so all the processing is done on the camera itself, that’s something pretty big that’s hidden under the hood and it was a big innovation within the Ucam. It has private storage and uses secure blockchain to log in and you fully own the data. It’s really on par when it comes to the features that you would expect, but it’s really the only camera when it comes to security and privacy guarantees.
The blockchain log in has a lot of benefits from preventing password breaches that have affected Wyze & Ring, some of the most high-profile hacks that happened were actually based on password exploits. So with a blockchain login, you can prevent a lot of that.
What security camera companies do you consider to be your main competitors and which companies would you like to collaborate with?
Actually we don’t see other security camera companies as competitors, instead, we see them as collaborators. All the camera companies on the market can integrate with IoTeX technology because we are not a hardware company, we are a blockchain company. So we want to take Tenvis and Ucam to the market to show that there’s a very cool privacy-focused product that you will like and get a market validation from them and have them integrate with our amazing blockchain technology to have more and more trusted devices which will be privacy-focused and users will have full ownership control.
If IoTeX is the platform that’s managing the data, how can IoTeX ensure the privacy and make sure that’s safe?
IoTeX is a decentralized platform, it’s not necessarily that we as a company are keeping it safe, rather the technology itself on the blockchain is keeping your data safe. Ucam uses blockchain for two reasons, one if for the secure blockchain login and the other is to issue the encryption keys and that’s really the important part about privacy - how do you issue the encryption keys only to users unlike other cameras, where companies will hold a version of the encryption key and also give one to the user, as a Ucam owner, you are the only one that will own the encryption key. So that’s really how IoTeX platform facilitates the privacy of these cameras.
If powered by IoTeX products deal with issues for instance if the user’s data is illegal and demanded by the government, what would you do?
I think it’s important to specify that we as IoTeX do not have access to your data, it’s what you would do, today, there’s not much choice. Talking about the ecosystem that Jing mentioned, people have the opportunity to take your data or access your device even without your permission with these very broad sweeping opt-in terms and conditions. But with IoTeX products you have a choice, obviously, there’s a legal system in every country and penalties for not cooperating with law enforcement, but at least, you should still have that choice.
On partnerships with enterprises & making the products widely adoptable
A lot of people don’t recognize that this is in itself a very big enterprise partnership, developed in partnership with Tenvis. Tenvis has a long history of making home security cameras, this is like the 10th or 11th generation of products and they have been Amazon’s choice in the cybersecurity category for a long time. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel and build something that’s not at the core of what we do. With Tenvis, we get some of the best manufacturing capabilities in the world and then we get to inject our software/firmware. that enables this much large vision for connected devices. We will not be able to connect the world of devices by building them ourselves as the question mentioned, this is an enterprise-driven model. We specialize in what we do and then we work to connect that will all the manufacturers around the world. And Tenvis is a great initial partner to showcase that and get this first mass consumer product there.
What are the plans to diversify the use cases for IoTeX to increase the potential of the token? Can IoTeX be integrated with hardware then than that developed by IoTeX? What other products are we looking into in the future and what are our plans for expanding the utility of IOTX?
Ucam is actually a sample to show to the community and manufacturers how partners can leverage our blockchain to design a new type of IoT products that will be user-focused and have privacy by design. In our pipeline, we already have a lot of different types of products to develop.
We used blockchain for very practical purposes in Ucam given that it’s a consumer blockchain, there’s no room for using blockchain just for the sake of using the blockchain. All the things we have built into Ucam are very purposeful to enhance security and enable full data privacy. But on top of that, there are other ways to use blockchain and in the context of IoT and blockchain, there are so many components where it can be plugged in. Whether it’s around onboarding trusted data from devices using hardware oracles, using blockchain as a decentralized identity account system to make sure people have their own independent data lockers and can own their data and it’s very practical in terms of using blockchain to issue encryption keys as we have done in Ucam. A lot of these use cases will take some time to mature but ultimately given our ability to work well with manufacturers and understanding the requirements will both offer practical products and expand the utility of the token.
Decentralization using IoTeX technology
Decentralization is bout distributing the points of failure in the network and that’s where the trust comes from. So if there’s one single point that attackers could look at and be like hey if we take this out the network will collapse or if that point decides to be a bad actor or collapses, that’s a sure sign of centralization. So the more that. You can split that out and decentralize the points of failure, that’s a good way to quantify the level of decentralization. And if we can map that definition onto IoTeX, where the validators are coming from, how many delegates are there, how many are active, and we have seen a very good rise in the number of delegates, it’s a very decentralized global network of delegates, which as a decentralized platform we are very proud of. Some of the indicators that networks use are the number of delegates, number of wallets, users, etc. and all of them apply to us too but we also have a special one, which is a number of devices, that are ultimately registered to the network in the form of what we call XID’s, decentralized identities on the IoTeX network.