Understanding the need for Privacy and birth of Beam.
Do you have something to hide? Are you an offender to be scared of something?
These are some of the everyday things one can generally hear when speaking about privacy. More often than not, Privacy violations are viewed as slight annoyances or non essential liberty to many who do not see the absolute need for it.
Hence, we thought this week at, “Beam India” we’d cover the touchy topic of the need for privacy and responsible reporting and how Beam plays a vital role in preserving privacy & confidentiality. India is rapidly transforming into a digital society and this topic deserves all the limelight.
All view privacy as the invisible limiting check on misuse of government power, as well as the power of private sector companies. The more someone knows about us, the more power we hand over to them. We have realized the judicious use of individual information is used to settle upon most of the critical choices made in our lives.
Individual information can influence our image and reputations, and it tends to utilize to impact our choices and shape our conduct. More often than not, it can be used as an instrument to practice unnecessary power over us. Furthermore, in inappropriate and dangerous hands, individual information can be utilized to cause us immense harm and mischief.
Privacy is about respecting individuals and their voluntary choices. Government of India even took a proactive step by introducing the Personal Data Protection Bill,2018 . If an individual wishes to keep something private, it is impolite to overlook that individual’s desires without a convincing and lawful motivation to do so.
Of course, sometimes, the desire for privacy can conflict with important values, so privacy may not always be balanced. Sometimes individual desires for privacy are just brushed aside because of the view that the harm in doing so is trivial.
Even if this doesn’t cause significant injury, it demonstrates a lack of respect for that individual and his liberties. In a sense, it is equivalent to saying: “I care about my interests, but I don’t care about others.”
Personal data is essential to numerous decisions made about us, from whether we get a loan, a license, or employment to our personal and professional reputations. Often it is seen that personal data usage determines if we will get investigated by the government or searched at the airport, or denied the ability to fly.
Indeed, personal data affects nearly everything, including what messages and content we see on the web. Without knowing the what’s and how’s of data usage, and the ability to correct and amend it, we are virtually helpless in today’s world.
Moreover, we are helpless without the ability to have a say in how our data gets used or the ability to object and have legitimate grievances heard when data uses could harm us. One of the hallmarks of freedom is having complete autonomy and control over our lives. We can’t have it if so many important decisions about us in secret without our awareness or participation.
Privacy is the key to freedom of thought. Always overlooking at everything we read or watch can limit us from exploring ideas outside the mainstream. Privacy is also key to protecting and speaking out of unpopular messages. And privacy doesn’t just safeguard fringe activities. We might want to criticize people we all know to others yet not share that criticism with the world. Someone might want to explore ideas that their family, friends, and colleagues dislike or are not open to.
Privacy matters because one doesn’t need to explain or justify oneself.
We may do tons of things which, if judged from afar by others lacking complete knowledge or understanding, could seem odd or embarrassing or worse. It can be a heavy burden if we continuously have to wonder how everything we do will by others and have to be at the ready to explain.
Privacy helps protect our ability to accompany people and have interaction in political activity. A key component of freedom of political association is the ability to try to so with privacy.
We protect privacy at the ballot because of the concern that failing to do so would chill people voting their pure conscience. Confidentiality of activities and institutions that lead to going to the voting booth matters tremendously, because this is how we form and discuss our political beliefs. The watchful eye can disrupt and unduly influence these activities.
In relationships, whether personal, professional, governmental, or commercial, we rely upon trusting the opposite party. Breaches of confidentiality are breaches of that trust. In professional relationships such as our relationships with doctors and lawyers, this trust is key to maintaining honesty.
Likewise, we trust people we interact with, also because of the companies we do business. When there’s a breach of trust in one relationship, it could make us more reluctant to trust other relationships also.
Privacy enables people to manage their reputations. How others judge us affects our opportunities, friendships, and overall well-being. Although we can’t have complete control over our reps, we must have some ability to protect our reputations from being unfairly harmed.
Reputations may sometime depend on protecting against not only falsehoods but also certain truths. Knowing private details about people’s lives doesn’t necessarily cause more accurate judgment about people.
People judge wrongly, decide hurriedly, judge out of context, judge without hearing the entire story, and judge with hypocrisy. Privacy helps shield themselves from these unwanted troublesome judgments.
Need for privacy pushed experiments in money
The basic need for people to store their money and transact in a secure way without relying on a centralized authority is still the main use case and the most important, which is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is still the top cryptocurrency and is as influential today as it was almost ten years ago.
Initially, transactions in the Bitcoin network were believed to be anonymous.
By generating random private and public key pairs, and using the public part to form an address that could be used to receive and control transactions, many Bitcoin users assumed that nothing in that process could link to their real identity. They turned out to be wrong. Using blockchain analysis, research has shown that there are always data leaks.
Mimblewimble was named after the Harry-Potter tongue-tying curse due to its ability to fuse transactions together such that they become indecipherable.
In August 2016 this new protocol was published by an anonymous author, suggesting an elegant approach to the topic of efficient confidential blockchain. It is called Mimblewimble3, a reference to a spell from Harry Potter books, and it builds upon two concepts originally proposed by Greg Maxwell, namely Confidential Transactions and Transaction Cut — Through.
In March 2018, Beam came into fruition. Beam initially sought VC funding forsharper business sense and hired a team of developers to work on the software full-time, allowing it to speed ahead of Grin in its implementation.
Beam sees itself as a “store of value” coin that has a fixed issuance schedule akin to bitcoin.
However, it is important no note that there was no permine, no ICO , and was instead backed by the treasury model and go with a Foundation Model after Mainnet launch to fully decentralize to the wider community.
BEAM is a next generation scalable confidential cryptocurrency. With Beam users having complete control over privacy , a user decides which information will be available and to which parties, having complete control over their personal data in accordance to their will and applicable laws.
Now that we understand the need for privacy and also got a brief opportunity to understand Beam, in the coming months we will deep dive into what Beam is based on and how Beam plans to grow in India where we nearly have 450+ million Internet users and a growth rate of 7–8%,putting India a global leader in digital economy and opening up the largest market for global players.
Do you think Privacy is needed? Or do you think it is overhyped? Let us know your thoughts below or join us on our channels to discuss.
You can visit the website here , also check out the FAQ section here.
Join us on Beam India Telegram here.
Join us on Beam India Twitter here.
You can download the Beam Wallet here.
You can follow Beam Privacy on Twitter here.
You can also join Beam Community here.
