Have you ever explored the meaning of privacy?

“A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”
— Cypherpunk Manifesto.

Now, you can try to apply this definition to your life. True? False? We can say that the definition can be applied to around 1% of people reading this and they are experienced cryptographers or computer scientists.

You might be surprised, disappointed or aggressive about the statements we have made but let us show some examples to you. If you are an active Internet user (you likely are) your privacy is under a huge threat.
The Internet as we know it today is a huge sponge of data controlled by several corporations spread across the globe. People tend to believe that every piece of personal data is encrypted and corporations don’t uncover it. What about targeted messages appearing CLEARLY out of nowhere?

Do you remember Facebook data leak connected to the Cambridge Analytica and the fact that it tracks you while you are NOT even registered? Google accused of leaking data around twice a year.

Isn’t that enough to prove that they already know everything about us, even the patterns that we don’t know?

“Okay, I stopped using every service that are blamed for the data manipulations. What’s next? I am clearly out of the infrastructure. I can’t normally chat with my family and friends and I am close to becoming paranoiac.”

Calm down. There is always a golden mean and we are here to explore one for this particular problem. The scientific name for this separate tech sphere is Zero Knowledge Proofs. The shortest possible description for it is “proving without revealing” and it works like that. Your data is encrypted that way that you can apply different processing to the encrypted data to get the proof. The best and the easiest way to explain the basics of it is the Ali Baba cave example.

Scientists have gone relatively far with the Zero Knowledge Proofs and the technology that really attracts us is Homomorphic encryption. What it basically does is allowing all sorts of computations on the encrypted data without decrypting it.
There are two types of it: partial and full. With partial encryption you can allow only predefined computations and with full a broader range of operations can be performed. Different algorithms can provide this and if you like to dig deeper into the technical part there are plenty of resources on the web.

We are slowly getting there. At this point you should already spin different use cases in your head and one of the most promising should be securing YOUR OWN data of course. This approach can be applied to the most cases of the digital identification systems. A perfect scenario — your data is only yours and is highly secure but you still can prove your age at the store buying alcohol or tobacco, you can still prove your identity and needed status to pass the border lines without really revealing who you are. Isn’t it a miracle? No, it isn’t. It is just a cryptographic task solved!

Inspired by the technology we have already started developing our own blockchain-based identification system.

But, enough of self-advertising. Back to science!

There is a confusion. Living in a world full of crime total privacy can create a massacre. The criminal revolution in the dark sides of the net can rise to the world with a new wave. The examples of that are flowing in our lives like major drug traffic being managed through the encrypted channels.

Stop, stop, stop. Wait a minute. Re-read the beginning of the article. Do not misinterpret privacy and secrecy or anonymity. The data you own will be encrypted but you will need your passport to interact with the world. The passport will store your data, but different departments will be able to determine your connections to the criminal sphere without knowing who you are. Sounds cool even for the law.

With such a toolbox the whole society can finally come to understanding each other needs more clearly and give the real freedom of data to everyone.

There is a road to a private convenient world. We see it like this:

• Fill the world with the open-source products available to install right from the source code, so anyone could perform a security audit and make sure that the software used is not infused with different kinds of trackers
• Create general purpose identification systems with zero knowledge proofs
• Educate community on cryptography and privacy
• Finally start following basic human rights on every level

The road might be tough and the concept can meet lots of resistance from the data monopolists but ther.