Digital Sovereignty: Taking Back Your Private Data in Web3

As the Fair Data Society puts it, we are workers in the data economy. Our personal data—essentially the digital blueprint of our lives—is collected by the platforms we interact with, often in an opaque way. At best, this personal data is used to improve our user experience. At worst, our privacy is violated, monetized, or even used as a weapon against us.

It all started with the emergence and growth of user-generated networks, when seemingly free social media networks, search engines, and companies saw new profit opportunities and got into the business of collecting, storing, analyzing, and selling user data. By 2022, the data market has grown substantially. According to Statista data, by 2020, a total of 64.2 ZB (1 ZB = 1 trillion GB) of data will be created, consumed and put online worldwide. By 2025, this figure is expected to exceed 180ZB.

Speaking about the evolution of data sovereignty in a profit-driven environment, Professor Sabina Leonelli said:

"Individual agency in the data economy has atrophied, with a few organizations dominating the conditions of information exchange and use, undermining individual rights and collective action."

In fact, more than three-quarters of the global search market is controlled by the Google search engine, and more than 3.6 billion individual users are controlled by Meta across four social media platforms.

The Process of Digital Sovereignty

Big tech companies are aware of the pressure and the growing need for regulation, so in 2018 the Data Transfer Project was born. Six contributors—Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and SmugMug—worked to enable seamless data transfer between platforms through a common framework of open source code. However, this is only the first step for users to recover their data.

Over the past few years, the need for transparency, trust, security, and decentralization has developed in multiple areas of our lives, from finance to organizational management to data storage. This is evident in blockchain technologies and solutions such as Decentralized Finance, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Web3, which aim to give users complete control over their digital lives and protect the fundamental human right of data privacy.

So, what is data sovereignty and outright data ownership? How to achieve?

Simply put, achieving data sovereignty means that users have full control over their data. They ultimately know (and have a say in) where the data goes and is used, without the data itself being locked into a single platform. Proponents of this concept aim to create a new, fair digital space where information will be used for social good and its value will be distributed in accordance with Web3 and fair data principles. There are many decentralized tools that will help make this happen.

Web3: my keys, my data

One of the main features that make Web3 different from the web as we know it is its lack of a centralized data repository. Decentralized storage gives us a single source of truth - just like blockchain does, only for private data and big data.

The use of protocols and a decentralized data layer will make it possible to encrypt and exchange information in a peer-to-peer network system, while content-based addressing ensures that we know that data has not been tampered with: when we download a block of data from a certain address, we Knowing that this data is correct because its hash corresponds to this address.

Furthermore, there is no data sovereignty without data interoperability. Unlike data monopolies where users are locked into proprietary interfaces, Web3 is based on the idea of using noncustodial solutions. By using keys, users will be able to access the same private dataset from multiple platforms (also known as BYOD) and move freely between storage and applications.

The registration process will also change. First, we create accounts using email addresses, or tie them to our Google and Facebook profiles. In Web3, email credentials will be replaced by wallet addresses. "Sign in with Ethereum" is a good example, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, which may become a standard. While all interactions with the blockchain are publicly viewable, logging in with an anonymous wallet address will help maintain confidentiality.

At the same time, builders and content creators will gain new ways to monetize their content. Tokens, including homogeneous and non-homogeneous tokens, are equivalent to Web3's "likes" and "reposts". These can be used to reward high-quality content and share data, while ensuring creators receive a fair share of royalties.

Finally, introducing decentralized governance is another new way to overthrow the monopoly of tech giants in terms of controlling data. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) validate transactions through consensus, potentially bringing democracy and transparency to blockchain decision-making processes.

Bringing trust and privacy to the data economy

Achieving digital sovereignty means treating users as people, not cogs in the machine of the data economy. Taken together, it can be achieved by building human-centric applications that prioritize data interoperability and data sovereignty, encourage the development of new web infrastructure, and support encryption, data protection, and ethical, transparent business models . Of course, basic digital literacy also reduces the chances that internet users will unknowingly give up their privacy.

In the end, it's important to emphasize that this is a collaborative enterprise—requiring a greater effort than a single individual or organization—and that the entire Web3 space should work together. In this way, we can begin to return personal privacy to users and bring trust to the data economy on a societal level.

Cointelegraph Chinese is a blockchain news information platform, and the information provided only represents the author's personal opinion, has nothing to do with the position of the Cointelegraph Chinese platform, and does not constitute any investment and financial advice. Readers are requested to establish correct currency concepts and investment concepts, and earnestly raise risk awareness.