After the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, centralized social media platforms have been in the hot seat with intensifying public scrutiny on how personal data is being managed and used. This not only paved way for the GDPR privacy regulations that came into force recently but also gave rise to what is called blockchain social networking.
The personal data of up to 87 million users, mostly in the U.S., was obtained by an analytics firm that, among its other work, helped elect President Donald Trump. In response to that revelation, lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and U.K. increased their scrutiny of the social media giant, and at least some Facebook users canceled their accounts. The uproar has only added to the pressure on Facebook and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg over how the company was used during the 2016 presidential campaign to spread Russian propaganda and phony headlines.
In April 2010, Facebook announced the launch of a platform called Open Graph to third-party apps. This update allowed external developers to reach out to Facebook users and request permission to access a large chunk of their personal data — and, crucially, to access their Facebook friends’ personal data too.
If accepted, these apps would then have access to a user’s name, gender, location, birthday, education, political preferences, relationship status, religious views, online chat status and more. In fact, with additional permissions, external sites could also gain access to a person’s private messages.
Less than five weeks after Facebook launched Open Graph API version 1.0 for developers, Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which he vowed to resolve users’ concerns about how their personal information was being managed.
He said: “We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want. I’d like to clear that up now.”
Although we should be aware that the current effects of centralization, we shouldn’t overlook that it’s only going to get worse. In fact, a select few entities have such tremendous troves of data on each of us, means that they have powerful means of control — both subtle and not — that we can’t take back. Every major tech company of the past decade has been gobbled up by one of just five major corporations: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
“We’ve centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who’s basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn’t elected by anyone. -Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde ”
The growing market for detailed personal data, which are used by marketing companies, analytics, credit-rating companies, publishers, and government bodies has become a very profitable corporate business in advertisement exchanges, profile “vendors”, audience segmentation, and data management platforms.
All the critical social profile data will be logged as a hash signature on to the Ethereum blockchain using anonymization algorithm, ensuring that all your stats and history legitimacy are private, verifiable or destructible on demand. Any manipulative actions (buying followers etc.) will be easily traceable and virtually impossible to hide or forge. The cryptographic strength of the data legitimacy will be equal to the strength of the entire Ethereum network. When user content is created and deployed on centralised online platform, the most unique and popular content is at risk of copyright infringement. There is nothing stopping anyone from simply copy-pasting .
When this happens, it diminishes the value of the original content gets affected, potentially making them worthless. Hashgraphed content will have transferable copyright functionality for authors to be recognised and rewarded fairly, eliminating any ownership questions. Blockchain will solve the main challenge for advertisers (trust and transparency) by having a trustless and transparent decentralized ledger where people can no longer buy fake data.
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