Data is the new oil.
At least that is what we've been hearing that from the incumbent technocrats over the last decade or so.
The narrative we've been fed is that we shouldn't worry about matters of privacy unless we have something to hide.
Regardless of your country, race, sex, age or religion, we all innately know privacy is a human right, not a privilege - regardless of what they try to tell us.
Humans are private beings. We need time to ourselves without the feeling of a watching eye looking over our shoulder.
If nothing more than to get our wits about us and go back into the world clear headed and ready to be the best versions of ourselves when we interface with others.
We do not live up to our full potential and pursue our passions in an environment of self censorship.
For further evidence of this, just look at how Facebook killed the social web.
This is not to be confused with the radical transparency in business and society dealing with humans and their vested interests, but rather the basic human right of all humans to not be spied upon, tagged and tracked like cattle the way we are today.
When Your Most Personal Data Is The Product
According to IBM - the company who actually sold equipment to Hitler during the Holocaust mind you, 90% of the data on the internet has been created since 2016.
IBM also happens to be heavily involved in massive data mining operations that is only rivaled by our own government. I wonder who they (and other corporations like them) will sell our data to in the future, and how those people / organizations will use our data? (I'm not talking about just Google Analytics or even Axiom consumer data ether - we know how that data is used already).
I'm talking about a level of data collection and context we can't even comprehend current day. Where we are headed, after years and hundreds of data points, preferences, relationships, associations, political views, etc...
A true "matrix" of data that could impact the very access we have in society. From the jobs we are able to get to the type of treatment we get from a lender.
An increasingly unspoken story that is being told behind our backs from the centralized institutions we depend on to conduct business and provide for our families.
Considering IBM's profit over people approach during one of the darkest hours in human history, something tells me ethics and the tenants of conscious capitalism isn't high on their list.
And it's only growing exponentially every day. In fact, the sheer volume of data is staggering if you look into it more.
Just to illustrate how invasive this has become in a very short period of time, here is a sample of the type of data our government is tracking on it's citizens every day:
- all email communications
- all websites visited
- all social media activity
- all internet searches
- blogging activity including all posts written, read and/or commented on (see patent)
- videos watched and/or uploaded online
- photos viewed and/or uploaded online
- mobile apps downloaded
- GPS-location data
- text messages
- phone call records - (see patent)
- Skype video calls
- online purchases
- financial information
- credit card/ debit card transactions
- legal documents
- travel documents
- toll records
- cable television shows watched
- educational records
- health records
- arrest records
- facial recognition data (surveillance cameras)
- driver license information
This is just scratching the surface too.
When we entrust centralized parties with our data, be it government or corporations, it has been proven over and over again that eventually - their safeguards will fail and that data will be compromised or misused.
Thanks to the sacrifice of real American patriots like Edward Snowden who have brought to light in recent years just how pervasive and far reaching this wholesale data collection at the hands of our own government has actually been.
The Social Web Migrates to The Blockchain
I'm not here to ponder the moral implications of all this, but rather remind people to be vigilant and observant.
There are solutions right in front of us that we can use today, it's just very few people know they exist. Even with the boom of Bitcoin and alt coins over the last few years, many are still unaware of the power and potential use cases of the underlying technology.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) aka the Blockchain - are without a doubt one of the most promising technical developments that have come along since the advent of the internet itself.
It is up to all of us to educate our friends and family on it's potential of this technology to both liberate and enslave - and how important it is to not allow the centralized parties to funnel us back into an even more controlled system than we are slowly existing now.
As a designer, developer, entrepreneur and creator - this technology has piqued my interest on many levels over the last 2-3 years.
The promise of a decentralized social web with projects like Leroy seemed exciting.
But even with the most recent advancements in projects like Ethereum and future changes in Ethereum 2.0 (sharding, DPOS, etc..), the micro transaction model is prohibitive for new users and just didn't seem feasible.
In spite of noble efforts from the community to reduce friction in usability, the barrier to entry is still significant for non-technical users for any kind of social application based on Ethereum.
In short, your grandmother will probably never use a Dapp based on Ehtereum (at least in it's current form).
Blockchain 3.0 Meets Social Web 3.0
With any Dapp built on top of a blockchain, scalability has always been the issue.
With the advent of Steemit by Dan Larimer, as well as Steemit recently open sourcing their codebase and other projects on the horizon like EOS (that will facilitate more websites like Steemit), it isn't hard to see this paradigm shift on the horizon.
These are by no means perfect implementations of social web 3.0, but rather a glimpse of what is to come.
You can see a reality where a person is economically rewarded proportionally to the merits of ones ideas and contributions, even if that isn't always the way it works now.
Where people have the choice to keep their identity, social connections / affiliations and other information private if they so chose.
Where people say what they really think and feel about a topic and share their best insights for the betterment of the community.
Where we get back to the web that was stolen from us by the promise of a more open world.