Data Element Marketization: Balancing Security and Development with Privacy Computing and Trusted Cloud Infrastructure

In the wave of data‑element marketization, data has become a strategic production factor, and the AI revolution has turned it into a critical foundational resource, bringing new security and privacy challenges.

At the 2023 World AI Conference, Ant Group Vice President and Chief Technology Security Officer Wei Tao delivered a keynote on "Data Element Internal and External Circulation," emphasizing that policy, such as the "Data Twenty Articles," fuels demand while the long data supply chain still faces high risks of misuse and leakage.

He argued that safe and healthy development of data elements requires tight coordination among policy, regulations, technology, standards, and ecosystem, and that Ant Group has been building multi‑layered capabilities, including platforms like "Confidential Computing as a Service" and the "Confidential Sky Computing" framework, to ensure trustworthy data flow across clouds.

The concept of internal versus external loops is introduced: the internal loop keeps data within an operator’s domain, whereas the external loop involves cross‑domain data movement, demanding cryptographic trust, blockchain‑based audit, and privacy‑computing techniques to control usage rights.

Legal foundations such as the Data Security Law, Personal Information Protection Law, and the "Data Twenty Articles" define baselines, while anonymization, blockchain for provenance, and privacy computing for controllable usage are essential to balance compliance and industry growth.

The industry faces a lack of universal security grading standards for privacy‑computing products; Ant Group proposes a five‑level grading framework to address this gap.

Looking ahead, three stages are outlined: computing confidentiality, big‑data confidentiality, and data‑element confidentiality, culminating in "Confidential Sky Computing," which enables cross‑cloud encrypted data circulation and computation.

Ant Group plans to promote Cryptographic Computing as a Service (C2aaS) and open‑source its "YinYu" trusted privacy‑computing stack to lower technical barriers and support widespread industry adoption.