Imagine an on-demand AI agent is launched, access your personal data store (managed by you), including your lifestyle, hobby, diet, cultural background, religious belief, etc., go out searching for merchandise, comparing them with your preferences, and then provide purchase recommendations to you. After the task is complete, this virtual agent will be terminated. There is no other places hold your personal data except your own personal data store.
This is not a new idea, it's the combination of Inrupt's personal data store and the concept of using trusted encryption software. The AI advancement simply makes this combination more pratical.
In Today’s world, a typical merchant website asks for your information, establishes your profile, tracks your browsing activities and purchase history, in order to provide personalized shopping experiences. But there are some problems:
Different shopping sites would have their partial picture of the user profiles (based on user’s activities at this site), they might not be able to provide the best personalized shopping experiences.
A small web shop may not have the marketing budget and engineering resources to develop sophisticated tracking mechanisms and personalization algorithms; while a mega shopping site would get more foot traffic, more user data to improve personalized experience, provide better recommendations, and attract even more customers. This could push small web shops into oblivion. Because of this, some retailers have moved their products to mega shopping platforms.
It’s very difficult (almost impossible) for customers to find an exotic, rare product in a boutique shop.
Despite mega shopping platforms' advantages, there are still many retailers who want to establish their own brand name and refuse to have their unique products listed side by side with look-alike cheaper products on these mega shopping platforms, these small web shops are still standing – case in point, there are over 5 million active Shopify stores worldwide.
The advancement of AI created an opportunity to democratize the e-commerce platforms, level the field for difference size web shops, improve personalized shopping experiences, and in the meantime, secure user data, strengthen privacy.
User data are securely stored in the cloud, managed by data ownersInrupt. User data would include activities from all websites. This would provide whole pictures of the user, and potentially generate better recommendations.
In the meantime, users have control about their data, nobody else.
A trusted AI agent is launched, it would access user data, search the web (big or small), compare product features with users preferences, provide product recommendations. For continued learning and future shopping assistance, AI agent will update personal data store with current shopping experiences. Finally, the (virtual) AI agent will be terminated.
This process is secure, as it follows the same paradigm of much used encryption process. Users have control of their private keys. To encrypt data, trusted cryptography software is launched, the software would read user's private key at run-time, its sole function is to encrypt/descrypt intended messages, and then it will exit.