Privacidade de dados: O caminho para um futuro desejável

Data Privacy: The Path to a Desirable Future

About data privacy: When you work with technology it is important to analyze future possibilities. In addition to choosing a path and starting to work on building that path as early as possible. It's no coincidence that I loved Amy Webb's speech, who launched the Tech Trends Report 2023 during SXSW. During her talk, the futurist explained that, according to her analyses, a “fusion” event with AI should happen in the future. What she called AISMOSIS.

According to Amy, this event could be positive or disastrous, with chances of 20% and 80%, respectively. He said, quite clearly, that one of the conditions for this future to be good for humanity is the ability to control our data. In other words: privacy.

Privacidade de dados: O caminho para um futuro desejável
Data Privacy: The Path to a Desirable Future

When I started, I decided that one of the priorities in my work would be to build tools to increase people's capabilities and rights. And never diminish or nullify these capabilities and rights. Therefore, when a platform collects your data and does not give you the possibility to make choices about that data, just as you decide what to do with your body, that platform is robbing you of possibilities and rights. It's that simple. 

The privacy of digital identities

For me, the most important privacy frontier will be the greater use of digital identities. Identity is a term with several definitions, but we generally assume it means the combination of one or more sets of data about people. In other words, to establish a person's identity, we collect characteristics and facts in the form of data. By combining these fragments of information we end up forming a portrait of people. Able not only to represent them, but to verify and authenticate these people when they are using services or carrying out transactions.

This data represented in digital identities are not just temporal portraits of our faces – quite the opposite. The combination of data collected about people can represent stories from their lives. And that's why we need to give control of data back to the people. Applying this basic rule of privacy is giving people back control over the narratives of their lives. 

Data and the Web3

Many technologies that are currently part of the so-called Web3 package have to do with the future we want, where people's privacy is respected and they have control over the stories that are told and shared by collecting and processing their data. An example of these technologies, which we mentioned in our talk during SXSW, are zero-knowledge proofs, a way of confirming that something is true without revealing the data to the ecosystem. In addition to ZKPs (zero Knowledge Proofs), there are other technologies available to teach technology to keep our secrets, generating even more opportunities for the use of digital identities and regaining people's trust in technology. This is a totally possible world, in addition to being the future I chose to build. The important thing is to start now, so that this idea becomes the present as quickly as possible.  

By Yasodara Cordova @ Fast Company