Must we open our kimonos?
In 2015 I read a book called Age of Context by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It is a good book in many respects, and I found it thought provoking.
However, there was one aspect of the narrative I found myself in constant disagreement with. It was their general premise that the price of highly personalised services is that we must surrender even more of our personal information. Of course, this is pretty much what we have been forced to do to access services controlled by the tech giants, and the consequence of this is considered in the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism which paints a dystopian reality rather than a future utopia of personalisation suggested by Age of Context.
What Scoble & Israel describe in their book seems technologically feasible, but they seemed to ignore the commercial reality of the tech monopolies being geared solely to make profits rather than deliver universal benefits for everyone. The societal impact of this, and the personal consequences for those using their technology is, at best, an afterthought.
However, I think there is justification for trusting that things are changing for the better. New privacy laws and anti-trust cases are starting to hurt the tech giants. There are emerging companies that now include ‘people and planet’ on their bottom line, not just profit. But perhaps the biggest driver is Web3 technologies that will enable future personalised services to be delivered without the need to take ownership or control of a user’s personal data. In the Web3 future it becomes possible for users to have full sovereignty over their data, and permit access to relevant parts when a service justifies its use. We can have highly personalised services driven by our own data, but without having to surrender it to companies that may (and currently do) abuse it for their own personal gain.
Better Internet Search has developed a unique patent pending method that enables private data to be used in a two-stage personalised search process which intentionally avoids revealing any private or attributable data to any internal or external party. We are also working with our partners, Partisia Blockchain, to apply their blockchain based multi-party computation (MPC) technology in future. This is based on on-chain Zero-Knowledge (ZK) computations and means that even the distributed processing units cannot see a user’s private data. Through this partnership we can ensure that all sensitive data and its processing will remain encrypted and decentralised. This will deliver new levels of anonymity and security for personal data used to personalise online services in our Web3 future.
Originally published at https://www.betterinternetsearch.com on June 30, 2022.
