the personal internet revolution: data freedom and personal control

“human history is a march towards greater individual freedom and possibility” <https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution>

prior to the industrial revolution, because of the time-consuming process of producing fabric at the time, making clothing was slow and inefficient. with mechanization, the process of producing fabric was sped up dramatically, and clothes became cheaper and and more plentiful.

the industrial revolution gave rise to amazing progress, but it also brought harsh living conditions to the people who fueled that progress. this situation had to be fixed with regulation (labor reform) and social change (trade unions). without these, there’s no doubt that factories and industry would be powerful and influential, but there’s also no doubt that individuals would be little more than expendable, replaceable parts.

the advent of the internet brought immense change and progress to society. but with that progress have also come the easy dissemination of lies and hateful content, the misuse of personal data by big corporations, and the lack of control by persons over the personal data that sustain the profits of these corporations.

as with the industrial revolution, regulations and social change are addressing these problems. but progress in this area is slow and fleeting: companies such as Facebook—even after admitting responsibility for its misdeeds and promising change—have continued to fail their customers when it comes to keeping private data safe.

instead of making the same mistakes of the past (and present), we must do better. we must devise infrastructure and mechanisms that make it difficult for companies to behave irresponsibly with personal data (and easy for them to act responsibly), and that make it simple and easy for people to verify the sources of the information they get on the internet, so that they assign such information the appropriate level of credibility.

one company must not have absolute power over the content a person publishes or reads. while providing a revolutionary mass-communication mechanism, Twitter has policies that often squelch free speech while at the same time allowing the dissemination of hateful content from a few influential entities. people must be allowed to publish what they want, and people must have ultimate power to specify which public content they want to see.

the personal internet revolution moves the balance of power from companies who use personal data to drive their profits to the people whose data is the fuel behind those profits.

after the personal internet revolution, companies like Twitter and Facebook will see their spheres of influence radically reduced, as it should be, given how those companies have behaved during their entire existence. they have not earned the people’s trust. to the contrary, everything these companies do shows us that they should not have the amount of power they wield over people’s lives.

what’s wrong with the internet?

although the internet is a powerful communications infrastructure and medium, it has, for the most part, failed at what it should be doing best: providing us with good, credible information, and helping us communicate effectively with one another.

these are some of the fundamental problems the internet has:

• it’s possible for a few unscrupulous players to sway the opinion of millions of people using lies and completely fictitious content.
• anonymity allows some bad actors to hurt others with impunity, and to clog the network and our devices with garbage and spam.
• an ineffective content-source identification infrastructure allows anyone to pretent to be someone else and disseminate content without attribution, which some people may regard as “the truth.”
• companies use personal information to make profits, without regard to the needs, wishes, and rights of the subjects of that information.

what’s the solution to the problem?

to begin with, we need an effective means through which entities (people, organizations, and companies) can establish and prove their identities. just as in real life. we need reliable and unforgeable identity credentials for the internet. based on those credentials, content can be tagged with special identifiers that establish its real source. people can use those facilities to quickly and reliably identify the source of the content they read, and gauge its credibility based on the source.

people need to be able to manage personal data, independently from any one company. companies can then compete for customers based not on keeping personal data hostage, but on providing the best user experience for managing that data. just like you can walk out of a Target store to visit the closest Walmart store, you should be able to “move” your data from one app to another, from one platform to another, with no ill effect. note that the data does not actually move; what changes is what companies are authorized to access the data.

as part of managing their personal data directly, individuals must be able to provide data consumers access to highly valuable, up-to-date data, in return for a cryptoasset (digital currency). individuals must also be able to specify in one place how they want their personal information to be handled by consumers. on the other hand, companies must find it easy to adhere to new regulations such as GDPR, to find the subjects of the personal data they possess, and follow the subjects’ data-processing and data-disposition wishes.

how is the solution implemented?

in the contemporary digital age, smartphones and cryptography can be the basis of a powerful and flexible identity-management infrastructure. for digital identity services to be trustworthy, these services must be provided by legal entities authorized to provide them, which include cities and government agencies. a person cannot establish that person’s identity without the help of authorities widely recognized (in the digital world as well as in real life) to provide that service. a Facebook account is not enough to prove someone’s identity, but a digital credential issued by a government agency and corroborated using biometric information through the person’s smartphone is.

cryptonetworks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have proved to be highly secure facilities where information can be stored and made accessible to all participants. cryptography also allows data to be encrypted such that only authorized entities can read it. using these facilities, people can store personal data securely and let other entities access it in exchange for a cryptoasset, which incentivizes and benefits both the data provider (the person whom the data is about) and the data consumer (the entity who uses personal data to generate revenue).

businesses are adapting to a more stringent personal-data environment by strengthening their data-access and data-processing policies and infrastructure (or by closing shop altogether). these businesses need straightforward ways of adhering to this changing regulatory environment. part of this solution is to offer companies assistance discovering the subjects of the personal data they possess, and to help them adhere to those persons’ wishes for their personal data.

at the core of this solution is a public, open, distributed cryptonetwork in which people can store personal data and use agents (third-party apps) to manage that data. for example, a woman can store her reproductive data on the network and use one or more apps on one or more platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, the web) to access and modify the data. at the center of this people-centric network is the cryptoasset that facilitates the interactions between members. the network implements an egalitarian economy with the aim of benefiting both data subjects and data consumers from the revenue-producing processes that use personal data as their fuel.

Target and Walmart. CVS and Walgreens. McDonald’s and Burger King. these are examples of companies that succeed through the specialized shopping experiences they provide. but underlying their success is the public network of roads and highways they use to move the raw materials and merchandise used to generate revenue and which customers use to get to the businesses’ locations. the personal internet is the public network on which forward-looking companies base their data acquisition and processing models.

companies always push the envelope (and the law) to maximize profits; it’s what they do. to balance that, we need entities who have the needs and rights of people as their North Star.

***

i have made Twitter and Facebook posts; they are not Twitter’s thoughts; they are not Facebook’s thoughts; they are my thoughts. i have published articles on LinkedIn and on Medium; they are not LinkedIn articles, and they are not Medium articles; they are Ernest Bruce articles. in the future, i will publish thoughts and articles using my identity. people will view that content on any platform they wish.

for more on this subject and my plan for a people-centric internet, read my whitepaper.