The media has been discussing Facebook for the last month incessantly and with good reason. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has come under fire by privacy advocates and users who feel the company has mismanaged user’s data.
The bottom line? Facebook extracted as much value from it’s users as it could with total disregard for their privacy and rights.
After years of poor data privacy management by Facebook, this latest incident has caused enough of a stir to require something to change. Can we trust Facebook to change its policies or is the companies business model fundamentally entrenched in the extraction of value from user data?
I believe the truth tends towards the later. Facebook must profit off it’s users in order to survive, but what if there was a way to both protect users privacy and allow Facebook to operate effectively?
A young blockchain company may hold the keys to this solution. Bridge Protocol is standing up to address the problem of privacy in the digital age. Bridge has designed a solution which straddles the careful balance between users, regulators, and business. Bridge provides cryptographic certificates which can prove a user’s identity to a company. A common use for these certificates is in KYC(Know Your Customer) checks.
The key here is that the certificates do not contain any of the user’s personal information. Users never need to submit their identifying information to the company that needs to verify their identity. Instead, the data is verified by the Bridge Protocol which verifies the information and issues a certificate. Personal data is never stored and the certificate functions in place of the actual personal information. Users simply prove ownership of the cryptographic key associated with the certificate and by doing so prove their identity.
Now you may be thinking “But how does this apply to Facebook”? Facebook uses the data of its users as information to target advertisements. Each profile is associated with a variety of data related to preferences, shopping habits, political views, and other information. The problem is that all of this data is associated with a given individual’s real world identity.
However, instead of linking all of this data to a real world identity and compromising user privacy we could instead link all of this tracking data to a Bridge certificate. This would still allow advertisers to receive data regarding user’s habits, views, and information while keeping that data separated from real world identities.
Using Bridge certificates would allow efficient ad targeting to take place while eliminating the existence of a centralized database where our names are linked to where we shop, how we vote, and which content we like. As we move further towards the monetization and tracking of our very attention data privacy becomes a basic human right.
Registering each profile to a certificate ID and associating all data to that ID is a fairly straightforward process. It is inexpensive and could easily take the place of linking information to real world identities.
If Facebook is going to handle so much of our data, they bear a fundamental responsibility to be good stewards of our information. If we can’t trust them to act with integrity, we instead need to convince Facebook to use a solution where we no longer need to trust them.