By Jason Warner.
There is a massive movement underway toward understanding who owns our data and what can be done with it. As individuals, we are subject to the “terms of use” that we blindly agree to when we sign up for online services. The personal information that we give away is growing exponentially as we add more smart devices to our networks. From phones to our smart houses, cars, and even refrigerators, we are inviting others to track our movements and information and build models around how to monetize or manipulate our behavior.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are facing significant pressure from governments and private groups to change practices that protect personal data privacy. Europe has been at the forefront of this movement and recently, Ireland ordered Facebook to suspend the transfer of European citizens’ data to the U.S. or face billions of dollars in fines.
Imagine this scenario: A Roomba vacuum cleaner is roaming your house cleaning up while you are at work but also mapping your room layouts. Your Samsung smart refrigerator is keeping track of what goes into your fridge. Ring and Amazon know when you are home, provide videos of those coming to your door, and can start to integrate facial recognition for helping fight crime at the local level. Or they can monitor which relatives visit and when. Add to this the integrated car/home/work scenario, then layer on social media, buying habits, and spontaneous testing triggers for getting you to stop on the way home for a discounted bottle of wine right when you are most susceptible to the suggestion and we start to have a manipulated society.
All this said, the tradeoffs for letting this data access happen are significant. We want our social media fix so that we can see where our friends have recently vacationed, and knowing that we are just about out of ketchup has value. Especially if we are cooking burgers on the grill that night. And yes, that bottle of wine to complement the meal would be helpful so that we don’t have to run back out to the store.
This discussion has raged for over a decade and in late 2007, a colleague was developing a system to aggregate social media feeds into a central control environment for individuals but back then, the tools to do so were much more fragmented. Enter Blockchain, Edge Computing, 5G, and a new mindset that controlling our data makes sense and we are ready for the revolution.
Oasis Labs has been creating tools for controlling and sharing data for several years and through the power of blockchain, they are creating a new “privacy paradigm.” Founder Dawn Song is also a Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. In this article from Wired, it is discussed how she thinks that our information can be monetized for our benefit rather than just for those providing the services.
At Fortress Data Centers, we are working with several new promising ventures including the Butterfly Protocol project where they are creating a peer-to-peer environment that begins to replace ICANN control over our domain usage. Butterfly creates a way for people, businesses, government, and other entities to get a domain name and never have to pay for it again. In other words, it can’t be lost due to forgetting to pay the registrar like GoDaddy a yearly fee. It is yours as long as you want it. With new top-level domain names like .(dot)human, we can create our infinite repository for any information we want to store and then use technology like the Oasis Protocol to layer in other privacy and monetization methods. With JasonWarner.Human, I can have a unique identifier that can also be used for logins, device authentication, and more.
As discussed previously, all data that we create starts at an Edge. With the heightened focus on owning our data and in allowing it to be used based on our control, Edge Computing becomes even more important. Oasis and Butterfly will work at the Edge as will many other technologies.
So before we all just blindly send our information to the cloud because it is convenient to click the box for approving the terms of use, let’s think about how we can build a new world that works for us. Fortress Data Centers is committed to bridging the divide between companies that want to work at the Edge and the needs of the end-users. Because as always, We Are Here to connect.
