The data economy of the modern age, part 1

The problem with centralised services and why you’re not the customer, you’re the product…

The high-profile data breaches keep on rolling in. If you thought the most recent Facebook hack on 28 September (affecting approximately 90 million users) was surely the last you would hear of for a while, you were wrong.

Yesterday it was revealed on the Telegraph UK that airline Cathay Pacific has lost the data of 9.4 million passengers in an attack by hackers.
The information lost encompassed everything from credit card information to passport details and home addresses.

Your average person may likely wonder where the value is for hackers.
Why do ‘big gun’ mainstream businesses like this continue to get hit?

Simply, as Sylo Co-Founder & Business Director Dorian Johannink puts it: “Information is power and information is money.”

Secondly, their architecture maximises the value proposition for thieves. Because in centralised services with millions of users like Facebook and Cathay Pacific, all of the data is located at one access point.

“From a hacker’s point of view, as that service gets more and more users, each day it becomes more and more attractive,” said Dorian.

“If they break into Facebook’s lock up; there’s a billion accounts that they could potentially access. Whereas in a decentralised model, hackers would have to break into a million different lockers, through distributed nodes.”

(Hint — if you’d like to better understand what ‘decentralisation’ means, watch this quick video.)

“Think of it like robbing a bank versus trying to rob every individual customer. A key thing that decentralisation improves, in terms of centralised services, is it gets rid of the goldmine.”

There goes the inferral again that there’s money to be made from sharing our private data…

How could that be true when a company like Facebook promises privacy?

“They say they’ve protected privacy, but there’s a distinction,” said Dorian.

“They protect your privacy against the public. You get to choose who of the public sees your posts or information. But Facebook still get to see everything, because it’s on their servers.”

“You send a private message — it’s not private between you and Facebook. That’s private from the public. Nothing is private.”

“Data is their currency and you’ve agreed to give that to them by using their service and you are their product. So they’re going to leverage that. Their customer is an advertiser, who they sell your information to.”

Knowing this if you feel trepidatious about leaving your personal information in the hands of a range of undisclosed centralised services, you’re not the only one.

“It’s scary that this data is out there and being ‘looked after’ by a whole range of companies,” said Sylo Co-Founder Ben Jordan. “Especially when you’re dealing with things like passport and addresses, the core pieces of identity. We need to move toward a solution that gives users control.”

“Decentralising the storage of this data, and allowing users to retain ownership of this data, goes a long way to protecting people online and also takes the burden of safeguarding this information away from companies.”

“Breaches like these are less than ideal for brand reputation. The decentralised data model protects against this risk...”

If you’re tired of being taken for a ride, come and join the decentralised future with us at Sylo. You can find out more about our privacy-protecting technology here.

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Part 2 coming soon…

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