With the tap of a button, you have the ability to communicate to your friend, a relative or your family instantly. In this modern era of messaging apps, it takes just seconds to send a message to anyone across the globe. Now imagine for a second, what happens if it doesn’t exist?
Seems scary right? But the real creepy thing is when you come to know about our data privacy which is no longer present. The messenger companies make a buck out of it by selling the user data in certain cases. It’s definitely the centralization to blame for accessing massive amount of user data that are being stored in giant data centers. Let’s say you want to get married and so you searched for wedding suits online and have totally forget about it.
Data Privacy Concerns
Now you start getting ads about the nearby coffee shops, ads about engagement rings, ads about wedding suits and so on. Wait. How is this possible? You start getting ads on your mobile phone, no matter what apps you open (unless the apps disable advertising). How do the ad companies know that you are going to marry someone in the near future? To be able to do this, the messenger app companies develop algorithms which monitor their users’ text conversations as well as audio conversations and start recognizing and labeling you. In our case, these smart algorithms label you as a soon-to-be-groom or bride and sell the data to the data brokers and also allow the advertisers in their platform to display their ads to you. The ads are relevant to you and you might be interested in it.
Blockchain and Messaging
The real problem here is the breach of privacy. Of course, you’re not getting paid for your data. The messenger app can able to pull off bucks by monetizing your data without you even knowing it. How can we escape it? Well, the solution is already here. It is Blockchain and decentralized messenger apps, also called as dApps.
Decentralized apps works by distributing the data among all the nodes of the network, and effectively retrieving them when needed. By doing this, we can make sure that there will be no point of failure as compared to the centralized messenger apps. Also, your data is in your control since the code of decentralized apps will always be open-source. You can effectively choose to monetize your data at your will. Meaning, you’ll be earning for the data you provide about yourself. Again, you can be specific while sharing your data. If you want your age to be not shared with the advertising companies, you can control this. It is up to you on what to share and what to not.
The messenger companies are already looking for ways to enable blockchain in their apps. Not to mention they are exploring ways on how also to make bucks from it. Communication is happening in lightning fast speeds and does the technology. The sooner businesses adapt blockchain the better. Messenger tech giants were pouring millions in investment studying blockchain.
