For the last 15 years or so, since the beginning of social media, the world has been divided into two types of people: those who were deeply nervous about the implications of giving anonymous for-profit companies nearly unfettered access to our personal data, and the vast majority of us, for whom it was more or less out of sight, out of mind.
The voice of the first group of social critics and privacy advocates has gotten louder in the last year or two as sentiment has shifted against the major technology companies that hold primary access to that data.
The expose around Cambridge Analytica, the data firm who used “legitimate” Facebook tools to develop in-depth data to build out tens of millions of voter profiles and later put those tools to use in service of the Trump campaign, represents an inflection point in the conversation.
First, for many people this is the first time the opaque and extensive collection and use of personal data has led to something (i.e. a Trump presidency) that is genuinely bad, rather than just kinda creepy like ad retargeting.
Second, this isn’t a story of hackers and a data breach, this is a legitimate company bending the rules but more or less building off of the actual business model of Facebook, which is to harvest and sell access to our data.
Third, this comes at a time when the loudest, most dynamic technology sector is screaming about personal data, the downfalls of platforms, and starting to offer alternatives.
I believe one of the most dramatic impacts that crypto and blockchain are likely to have is a fundamental re-orientation of how we think about our personal data.
This will not simply be better privacy controls, but will be about systems that actually allow us control over how we provision our data and to whom, and get rewarded for it.
Let me put it differently. When one service asks us to sign away our data rights in exchange for use, and another service instead says “Hey, your data is valuable. Can we give you some tokens in exchange for it?” it will forever change what we expect in our relationship with companies.
Taken in this light, every single industry that today has a business model based on third party data capture is poised for disruption by someone who gives the first party control and upside in their own data.
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