Big Ideas: Privacy, Data, And Security in The Future Web
Since its inception, the web3 tech stack has been inseparable from the debate of potential social issues it could solve. If almost all the other technologies remain obscured from the end-users, the why’s and how their development had changed our society remain an interest for a handful number of researchers (even AI had just recently risen concerns while being around for quite some time), decentralized [anything] has to tackle some kind of social problem to be relevant. Quite often this is used as an angle for criticism, as if everyone else is building new tech just for the sake of doing it.
What most critics and skeptics fail to fathom, is that the original Bitcoin paper tackled a deeply social problem from the start. How do you trust someone in a group of individual agents without appointing some authority that enforces trust and keeps everyone in check? What’s more, instead of going for some big abstract theory, Satoshi picked a singular problem: how do you prevent agents from spending more than they have in such a network? This train of thought led to a beautiful idea: why use any third party at all if we can ensure everyone plays by the rules at the network level?
And so it goes, blockchains, decentralization, world computers — all that became the core of the new web have always been focused on solving other kinds of problems. It is only natural that other successful projects use the blueprints of the original idea: take some particular social problem and approach it with a tech solution.
Super Protocol follows the same path. The original issue we picked was not some big abstract problem, we recognized that a weak point in any decentralized system, if it’s up to reaching true decentralization and trustlessness, is the data processing part. You can encrypt the data while it’s stored somewhere or transferred, yet processing it requires another level of security. So we went with a tech solution for a problem as old as cloud computing itself: protecting data while it’s being processed on someone else’s machine.
This led us into the rabbit hole of building a system that would keep the data safe on all its levels (for what is the point of having secure computations if the results can be altered or stolen on the way out?). At the time, we didn’t even think that such a system could have a multitude of applications and cover a number of use cases, concerning not just data protection.
Turns out, in the world where people spend most of their time online: communicate on work or personal related topics, do their research, entertain themselves, make deals, and transfer and accept money for a variety of products and services (some of which are digitized, others conclude in outside the web) data is very much connected to the privacy and security to the point where one could not tell the difference.
Often debates on the issues of whether one’s private life should and could be protected turn into long listings of potential corner cases. Let’s take another approach: in 1891 two American lawyers (Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis) described the right to privacy as the right to be let alone. We stand by that: if the user does not want to share the data — they must have tools and ways to protect it. It should be that simple.
With the infrastructure, Super Protocol is building it can be made. Dynamic applications built on top of Super Protocol can use the data protection tech that ensures their user’s data is safe by design. What kind of data and what type of relations can be deduced from it? This should not concern anyone other than the user.
