The “X” Factor: Privacy and the Freelancer
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You’ve got your online account locked up tighter than Fort Knox with passwords stretching half a page and bookended and enough gibberish to start a new alphabet, two-factor authorization, login alerts, and IP address locks. Yet, you don’t feel any safer, nor your works any more secure.
You have every right not to.
Online platforms collect an enormous amount of data from users. From basic information such as date of birth age-sensitive contents to names, location, search history, sites visited, devices used, time of visitation, and contents clicked, everything we do online can be tagged, bagged, and worst yet, sold.
With Big Data vendors reported pocketing over $57 billion in 2017 alone, the buying and selling of users information — without their consent — is big business. These businesses have grown quite proficient at shearing data wherever it can be found. These days, personal websites and social media network haunt. By leveraging data sourced from these channels, businesses aim to better serve customers through hyper-personalized, relevant advertising by getting to know them as intimately as they can. And companies don’t really have to bother with collecting data when they can easily buy it from third-party sources or sell to them. Third-party data brokerage has grown into its own industry — without asking for your consent of course. However, while the ordinary user may not be bothered by some entity acquiring data they’ve never bothered checking on before, the on-demand professional may have cause for concern regarding having all their engagements out in the open — and traded.
While there is nothing wrong with having one’s body of work on as many platforms as possible for any professional, the nature of freelancing often requires the freelancer to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA). NDAs are confidential, legal agreements between two or more parties to share information among themselves that cannot be shared to any other party outside the agreement. NDAs are often used to protect trade secrets and other sensitive information from competitors and may cover everything from sales and marketing strategy to product design, potential customers, proprietary software, recipe, and formula, manufacturing process, and even personnel list.
The existing system for connecting the on-demand employee with employers require intermediaries to facilitate connection and play supervisor. Signing up to these service exchange platforms requires the freelancer to input personally identifiable information. So far, so good, just like any other background check, right? Of course it is, until the not only propagate your information — without your consent — to places your never knew existed, or worst, outrightly publishing it just to make a point. If that wasn’t worrisome enough, try adding those malicious actors on the prowl for your identity.
In under seven years, Internet identity thieves have carted away with over $107 billion in the United States alone. However, fake credit cards are just the tip of the iceberg. Fraudsters can steal online identities to perpetrate other crimes including impersonation.
New government policies have started addressing how businesses collects, store, use, share, and analyse consumer data. However, these practices, especially, by private companies are highly unlikely to go away, meaning these problems are equally unlikely to go away, right?
Not if Hiway has anything to say about that.
Knowing that its workforce engagement and recruitment platform will also be gathering an enormous amount of personal information, Hiway’s development is based on securing user’s privacy through the blockchain. By decentralizing access to the platform, Hiway is not only eliminating the centralized points of failure on traditional system, but also greatly benefits from the blockchain’s groundbreaking data security features.
Blockchain-based authentication removes the human factor and bottlenecks to password creation. Where the traditional system remains reliant on the reliability of the user to select strong password, Hiway’s blockchain protocols uses a distributed public key infrastructure and specific SSL certificates for authenticating devices and users.
Every action on the blockchain is time-stamped including access and storage. Traditional systems store users information in centralized locations that can be breached and hacked. The blockchain, on the other hand, uses a distributed and decentralized mechanism to store users information across different devices that can only be accessed by users with the right access that have been verified on the blockchain. The blockchain’s time-stamped record ensures that every activity and transaction is 100% traceable without compromising users privacy in a way that the current existing system cannot replicate.
