Facebook, Google, Amazon, these mega corporations in common have all been developing massive databases and profiles of individuals. The obvious use case is tthey use this to target ads and sell to you better. So what!? i'd rather get an ad for something i'd want to buy!

The problem is that this data in the hands of this companies leaves you no room as to who gets to see that data or how they use it. Once they have it behind closed doors they use it in any way they can get away with. Every week it seems like new information on a hack or data leak from facebook comes out. Documents revealing facebook has been selling your text conversations to other companies like netflix. Not only could they read your messages, but they could delete your messages as well.

To me the biggest most ominous threat is that of AI, and crowd data. That topic is too vast for this post, so let's address something more practical. Did you know that in all likelihood you are apart of a searchable database of hacked usernames, passwords, social security numbers and other information that identity thieves can use to impersonate you? These databases are built on insecure websites as huge as facebook getting hacked everyday.

With more and more hacks and leaks from the major websites people are starting to see very practical reasons why giving data to centralized databases is a very bad idea.

Encryption saving they day

Knowing all this can put even the most calm people in a frenzy trying to understand who to blame. There are many places to address these issues, and they need to be looked at from many different angles. If you trace it to the root of the issue however you realize that the information starts with you. You, the individual must be the key holder to your data. You need to chose who has access to it, but if you are careful with your personal data in this world then you won't likely get to use any websites at all (i've been off facebook for over 9 years now, which at one time was very inconvenient and isolating).

Ultimately you need to be able to grant permission to who does and doesn't have access to your data, and under what circumstances they can retrieve it. This might be an off the wall example but what if amazon doesn't even need your address to ship you that new snuggie you ordered? Maybe your address can be encrypted in a way so that just a key is handed off and the only person who sees your address is the driver for the parcel delivery service?

This is an area that some open source cryptography or distributed ledger projects look to address. There are some projects which aim to make identity verification between existing services more secure like civic, but there are other projects which are aiming to address this at a much deeper internet protocol level like maidsafe.

This is really just a quick pondering on an extremely complex subject, but I want to start sharing this idea that individuals can be the keyholders to the information in their life and that we as a culture should be exploring this more.

If you want to read more on the subject of privacy a good source for current articles on this matter can be found on the privacy reddit group one of my favorite subreddits.