How Cryptokitties will solve the Facebook data breach.
Yesterday the media reported that Cryptokitties raised a USD 12 mil investment. Nota bene from those venture capitalists that invested in Airbnb and Coinbase. Crypto what? Cryptokitties is a blockchain based virtual game that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell various types of virtual cats.
A few days earlier, whistleblower Chris Wylie revealed how Facebook data was misused for political gains. Overnight the world realized that posting a like or sharing a picture on Facebook can make u prone to political propaganda. #deletefacebook or should we wait for #cryptokittydatarevolution?
Who doesn’t use Alphabet’s services like Google, Chrome, Waze or Youtube on a daily basis? Same goes for Facebook and its affiliated platforms like Instagram or Whatsapp. These tech giants are receiving and storing billions of user data every minute. The same way an oil field gets supplemented with oil on a daily basis. Note that when you use Google Maps you are not Alphabet’s client, you are a user who’s navigation data is being monetized to others. In short: They make money based on your data. I am not portraying them as being voluntary evil. Their success and ingenious technologies has led them to become so big that it becomes difficult to keep everything under control. Unfortunately, the consequences when companies use their crafty algorithms to their advantage, can be eye-opening.
To stop the (mis)-use or transfer of user generated data, the European Union issued the GDPR directive. Which in short obliges each consumer to give clear consent for data usage. Yet can legislation truly solve this issue? Can it keep the beast in the cage? Also, doesn’t this transcend the level of countries or political unions?
There is good news though! The evolution of technology might have given us a path to an epiphany. The birth of blockchain has given us a way to automate trust in a decentralized way. The blockchain is the enabler for a decentralized World Wide Web. A WWW that allows us to lead our digital lives but keep the data safely and with personal ownership. All those who want to manipulate or use your data should come to you. In this case -let’s say a campaign team in some election- should approach each Facebook user individually instead of accessing Facebook’s front door. Blockchain technology can make central orchestrators like Facebook or Google obsolete.
Yet Blockchain is still in its infancy. But the opportunities are gigantic. If you can automate trust you can replace notaries, banks, exchanges, car dealerships, … But that’s where it gets tricky. The technology remains difficult to scale. Blockchain entered the mainstream arena with crytpocurrencies of which Bitcoin is the best-known example. However, the increased adoption of Bitcoin has caused its automated trust mechanism to take minutes rather than seconds. Time that increases each day. Further, we see that most use cases for blockchain lie in the financial space. This makes it difficult to grow and scale because consumers in this area remain conservative. If we make the reflection on how the “classic” internet became mature we see it mostly did through computer games and adult content, not through all the business and financial applications we know today.
Hence my enthusiasm with regard to the success of Cryptokitties. If games like these, can create a global buzz like e.g. Pokemon Go had. It will drive scale to blockchain platforms. Scale that will put enough developers and money behind it to make it mature enough. Also, these leisurely applications will drive adoption and familiarisation of the platform. It will even let consumers consider alternative decentralized social platforms. The combination of data breaches (and we will see much more of them) and recreative apps like Cryptokitties will be the first step toward the so-called Web 3.0, a new and safer decentralized web. So, don’t delete Facebook just yet, play with the kitties and be thoughtful about your data usage…
