The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower has recently commented on the necessity of technologies like blockchain in the battle for more consumer privacy.
Brittany Kaiser was a business development director at British data analytics company Cambridge Analytica before she revealed that Facebook had shared raw data on over 87 million profiles in the lead up to the 2016 election.
Many have said that this was an integral part of Trump’s having been elected, and that is where a lot of the controversy came from. Kaiser has gone on to co-found a digital intelligence startup called the “Own Your Data Foundation”, which naturally focuses on privacy and data protection.
During her interview with CoinTelegraph Kaiser said:
“In my opinion, it’s really blockchain tech and blockchain entrepreneurs that are gonna solve a lot of the problems of the data protection crisis.”
This does highlight the power blockchain technology has to help move the world into the next phase of the Internet. Facebook is probably one of the worst companies for data protection, which is why their Libra Project received so much pushback. Additionally, Signal and Telegram have emerged as far superior messaging apps when compared to Whatsapp on the privacy front.
Brave Browser is already one great protocol that uses Basic Attention Token to help users monetize their attention, but there are a lot of other options out there as well.
Data Protection in the Future
Over the last several decades, it has emerged as somewhat of a trope that Switzerland was the place to go if you wanted to shield your money from other countries/governments. It seems like they are also quite advanced when it comes to data protection, with Germany also doing quite well in this regard.
Kaiser went into some detail on how the U.S. was very weak on data protection and had virtually no legislation in place at the moment. One could argue that it is these loose regulations that allowed Facebook and Google to thrive, and that they wouldn’t have done as well if they were formed in other countries. However, one would also be forced to answer the question of whether this was fair to users.
Coinbase’s Founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong, recently made remarks about the likelihood of a privacy coin gaining dominance in the 2020s. There are 3 different ways this could happen. First, it could be an existing privacy coin like Monero or Zcash. Second, it could be a known protocol like Bitcoin which later adopts more privacy features. Finally, it could be a brand new coin. Time will tell, but the need for privacy definitely isn’t disappearing.