Own your data.
The Future is Private. Don’t let one company own it.
I have been asked repeatedly whether I truly believe that what I am building is useful. More often than not, the question comes from people who think blockchain is just a buzzword with no real use-case. We had quite a few discussions here at Lightstreams about “Why” we are building decentralized technology in the first place. What’s the vision? What are the long-term goals? What are we trying to achieve?
We want people to be sovereign with their data. We want to help shape a world where people have basic human rights regarding their personal data and their digital selves. We want to build the technology that makes that vision possible.
Why not just trust companies with your data?
When we say “own”, we really mean “have agency” or “control” over. When a person gives full-access and rights to his/her data to a third-party application or company, they do not have agency or control over it. In that sense, they do not own their data. The way most web or mobile applications are built today means that you, as a user, have to trust a company or developer with some of your personal data. Even if there are restrictions, (e.g. if you live in Europe with GDPR), you still depend on some company’s goodwill. And unfortunately, as we have seen in the past two years, companies are very often not worthy of that trust.
The case for decentralized technology
In my view, one of the strongest arguments for decentralized technology comes from the separation of powers that naturally occurs when the state of the system depends on multiple people/companies observing/running it. C.S. Lewis said that “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching”. We live in times when companies have proven time and time again that they will not do the right thing. I’d argue that putting enough eyes to watch and run a network, although it does not necessarily prevent collusion, might still help move us in the right direction.
What about the data?
Blockchain technology, and more specifically Smart Contracts, already help with one part of decentralization. Code & business logic are both physically decentralized (i.e. ran on several independent machines) and also politically decentralized (so long as the blockchain network has some form of decentralized governance). But, to my knowledge, there are actually very few blockchain stacks (please do comment if you can point some out) that have created a secure and private decentralized data storage layer with access control rights. And simply encrypting the data onto something like IPFS does not count! What is needed is a set of specifications and standards that allow applications to store application and user data onto a space that is controlled by the user.
The Smart Vault
For the past year, Lightstreams has built the technology that enables applications to store personal data in a GDPR-compliant way. It’s private by default and only hosted on the user’s device. Only the owner of the file, content, data can grant or revoke access. It’s distributed and p2p meaning that once the access has been shared, even if the original user goes offline, the file/content/data will still be available. The rights remain on the side of the user. And if that same user revokes the access, the content can no longer be accessed. You can read more about it here.
Conclusion
As users, we have given almost despotic power to applications in exchange for our personal data. We’ve also grown accustomed to it. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Users should be in control of the data they share and they should be able to decide if it should be processed at all by applications. In most cases, it does not need to be. Let’s start a digital data rights movement. Now. #ownyourdata. Ask companies and developers to start building privacy-enabling decentralized applications today.
Don’t forget
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