Meet the VETRI tech wizard.
What do you do at VETRI?
I’m the IT lead for CreativeDock, in tandem with Giorgio Zinetti from the VETRI team in Zurich, which makes it easier to manage the whole development team, where half of us works from Zurich and the other half from Prague.
Why did you join VETRI?
People seem to be generally aware of the fact they are using free services, being given discounts, joining loyalty programs and so on in exchange for their personal data. However, the data are intangible to them and they are not able to quantify their value. We have the opportunity to put it down, black on white — who has their data, how much they are making on it and, most importantly, take action, get the data under their control and either allow or disallow their flow. So I joined VETRI to wake up in the morning with a good mood that we’re working on something meaningful.
What did you do before you joined VETRI?
I worked as a freelance software developer, data developer and security engineer at Atos, Deloitte and KPMG. At CreativeDock, I work as a data engineer and CTO of Big Data team’s projects. Besides working at VETRI, I give data mining lectures at the Charles University in Prague and ethical hacking lectures at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
What do you like most about working at VETRI?
The team of experienced people from various backgrounds, people from large corporations as well as their exact opposites, who think outside the box but are not anarchists at the same time. Quite the contrary. We want to turn the personal data ‘wild west’ into a decentralized (but standardized) ecosystem where institutions and companies can cooperate to the benefit of both sides — not to circumvent each other with the help of middlemen where one party has no idea about what’s happening with their data and the other party can’t tell what’s the quality of the data they received.
What is your vision for VETRI?
When someone joins VETRI as a newcomer, they should immediately find out that they should treat and protect their data the very same way they manage their money — not to leave them somewhere unattended, not to allow someone to seize them without their deliberate decision. If I use my data — which also constitute my identity — for authorization, I should have an overview of how they move and where they currently sit. Might someone want to use my data for commercial purpose, I should have the option of putting a price tag on it or negotiate the price. I should also have a proof that someone accessed my data and under which conditions the access was granted.
From the point of view of the company that buys the data, I expect receiving ‘raw’ (directly from the data owner), high-quality and verified (digitally signed) data. At the same time, I prefer rewarding my current/potential customers (or customers of my clients) for the insights over someone who tries to pull the data from people ‘secretly’ and where I have no control over whether they are telling me the truth.
