Who's taking my data where?

Yesterday, rumors were rife about both Tumblr and WordPress selling data to Midjourney. One of the first microblogging platforms, Tumblr was primarily known for allowing users to share images and short videos in addition to blogging. However, in 2018, it ceased to allow sexually explicit content, though it is still allowed with restrictions. Wordpress, on the other hand, has become a well-known blogging platform. The owner of each of these businesses is a company called Automattic.

Do you think this is a one off case?

Wait !!

Google, which already has access to enough of our data with our consent, has teamed up with Reddit in what appears to be yet another historic deal to supply the juggernaut with training data. Last year, in fact, to the disappointment of many of its customers, Redditt revised its terms and conditions for its data APIs. "We have a business to run,"? is what they said.

Let's take a step back and ask a few questions.

Should we even care?

Most of us don't even read the fine print when we sign up for services on new sites or platforms that we willingly join before sharing our chats, ideas, gossip, images, and sometimes even short celebration videos, because everyone else is doing it.

For a lot of us, safety lies in numbers. A lot of us think, "Thousands of people are out there on this platform doing the same thing; they wouldn't dare compromise this by doing something as stupid as selling our data." Time and again, we have been proven wrong, much after we found out what was happening. Even then, we accepted reality and moved on, restricting ourselves to what we put out, only to break our own rules a few months later.

Are we given any options?

Firms need to make money!! On a regular basis, they must account for the tons of infrastructure in their data centers or the public cloud, as well as the manpower needed to build and support these systems for their intrusive shareholders or stakeholders.

Is there a possible way out?

Welcome to the world of web3

Like it or not, user?control and ownership of their data is one of the strongest use cases for distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, which has received, to be fair, mixed success until now.

Blockchain has the ability to store user data encrypted on the chain, where only the user who put it there has access to it via his or her own credentials.

The problem with the internet today is that most of it is still on Web2.

In Web2, data is controlled by the entity that provides the platform. The entity could be a government, a corporation, or even an individual. The last person who has control of the data, is the user, even though the data is technically his/hers.

Systems could go down and users could lose access to their data temporarily, and this could impact people's livelihoods, but as we have seen, they aren't compensated since: - hey, they're not in control!!

This is one of the things what web3 is meant to change.

This is what decentralization brings. User data will be stored encrypted on the distributed blockchain. On Web3, users will create smart contracts with third parties to exchange information, which could be their own data or even transactions, and all this will be stored on the chain.?

Why is this feature so cool?

1. Any individual snooping on the chain will encounter a lot of encrypted information, which appears garbled. Even if he or she is able to get his or her hands on this, they cannot do much here as the cryptography required to decrypt it would outweigh the costs of even trying it.
2. This means that companies, if they do want to share information with third parties, are out on a limb here. Unless users agree to part with their information on their own, companies can't do much selling their users encrypted data to third parties who cannot see it.

Web3 has many advantages, chief among them being user privacy. There are many other aspects within the realm of finance and the broader initiative to restructure the global financial system. That is not what we will discuss here.

Blockchain has, as mentioned above, met with mixed success; in fact, some would say that it is still in the trough of disillusionment, unable to find the spark that pushes it onto the slope of enlightenment.?

If completely reorganizing the financial system isn't among them, then perhaps user privacy will be the case that propels it into the mainstream in the end.