Who are you on the internet?
Just ask yourself, who are you digitally? I have been asking this question to myself lately and something haunts me. Who am I on the internet? Is it really me or the digital twin. Well the case seems to be simple as several studies suggest that we are only about 90% similar on the internet to what we actually are in real life. Considering both positive and negative aspect to around 10% variation which include hiding the flaws and increasing those attributes what we don’t actually posses. So, the question comes back “what is our digital identity”?
Is it really something to worry about?
Well, we see many options before us like instagram, linkedIn, facebook, whatsapp, google scholar and what not. It would not be wrong to say that we are carrying out multiple digital twins (our digital versions) on these platforms and constantly we are updating all these platforms individually. How about having our own one single identity also known as self sovereign identity which is what everyone needs to manage and this alone will be sufficient to handle all the request from all the other platforms. Well now you must be thinking that how can this happen and I know we are quite early to talk about this concept but tell me if you were at your conscious in the early 1990’s and someone like Jeff Bezos were trying to convince you to buy groceries online, would you really believe it then? Exactly, that was the era of early internet and people had no idea of ecommerce back then. Similar is the case with the Digital IDentity (DID) which is based on the new age of decentralized internet.
Wait a minute, did I heard Decentralized Internet?
Yes, Decentralized internet is the way our new internet should work on. Traditionally, everything is based on the client/server architecture. Romantically saying, this way was perfect for the early internet use cases. Now with the daily advancement in the era of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) our use cases have expanded. From ideation to deployment, we somewhere started to compromise with the privacy and security. Trust issues have arised so much in the past decade. Believe it or not, but when I say ‘trust issues’, this is only coming from those that understand how internet, monetization and tracking of activity of customers works. Rest non-technical person don’t even have an idea about how top giants companieis are tracking them and using their data. As of now, we only know one use case of using customer data to provide them with better ads and services. But think beyond politics, Data is the new oil, and giants like Google and Facebook want to compete in this new digital war.
Still not convinced?
Okay, so this is my final proof of the day (tried and tested) for you all, do try it on your profile’s too.
Many of us use Facebook right? Okay, I get it, many of us have moved to newer platforms like Instagram and WhatApp as let’s accept Facebook is a bit outdated to use in comparison to previous two. But did you know that facebook can track you and your activity even when you are not using it, or it’s logged off? It tracks which website you visit, what you did and maintains a history of your activities. Yes dear, it’s true and this is known as Off-Facebook Activity. I haven’t used facebook in years, but when I came to know about off-activity, I quickly logged in to facebook and ran into the settings. This is what I found.
Scary right? Well see more what I found.
Well, one zero effect positive thing is that you can turn it off. Did you see I used the term zero effect? It’s because turing it off won’t actually help anything. Facebook will still collect data about you, and most importantly you will still see the same number of ads (you can see in the image below). How shameless this traditional internet is even if I say stay away from my personal space.
Conclusion
What we saw was from Facebook, and we also know that now Instagram and Whatsapp are under the umbrella of Facebook. Can you imagine how doomed we are. Who knows what going inside the functioning of whatsapp or insta. I think I answered pretty much to why you need a blockchain. It’s high time to have our privacy and control back to our hand. With Blockchain our Digital Identity (DID) will be secured and the control to it will only remain to us. We will share our data only with those whom we intend to. With decentralized networks, data will not stored at one (prime) location of big tech giants databases but instead placed in a distributed manner. This way we have more access control to our self sovereign identity. Organisations like IOTA (one of my favourite) have started working on DID’s which will be stored on the Tangle and this alone will be sufficient to say who we are on the Internet. We need methods to stop companies from taking our data and mining there pockets. It’s time we take our control back from them.
Thank you for reading.
May Blockchain be with you.