Communication on instant messaging platforms is a honey pot for service providers and surveillance companies. Decentralized privacy preserving applications may be the light at the end of the tunnel
Blockchain is disrupting every industry, chief among them being banking and finance. While DeFi has seen tremendous growth in the past couple of years, there are certain sectors making quite a bit of progress.
One sector that blockchains are yet to take over is social media. Humans are social beings. We are enslaved by the need to connect with other people. Instant communication today is facilitated by platforms like Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Discord etc. Some of these are BigTech with valuations in the tens of billions. Their growth can be attributed to billions of people using their platforms.
Social media platforms are the middlemen connecting people. They collect your data, including personally identifiable information for purposes of providing you their services. However, most if not all of these platforms aren’t transparent on how they process the information they collect. Meta, the parent company that holds Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram has been sued countless times, more recently over claims of accessing patient’s data. Facebook pixel, the tracking and analytics tool that’s used by websites to track users from Facebook, supposedly shares information back to Facebook about the patient’s protected health information (PHI).
Centralized social networks monopolize user data. They share it with third-parties that track you with cookies, ads, and other bothersome internet junk. Some of them store your data for as long as 5 years. Privacy laws that are established to keep BigTech at bay are weak or nonexistent in 47 of the 50 U.S. states. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is touted as one of the toughest privacy and security laws in the world. But the Irish Data Protection Commission that oversees its enforcement on BigTech has been criticized for its inadequacy in enforcement. Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the European Data Protection Supervisor, agrees. “Way too often, the GDPR puts its constraints on small entities but spares the big ones,” he says.
Peer to Peer Private Communication
In the 1990s, the development of peer to peer communication was driven by file sharing platforms such as Napster which shared music files between computers connected to its decentralized network. Every machine served both as a client and a server, uploading and downloading files to and from the network.