Why Decentralization Matters (or: How Not to Lose Your Music, Your Books, and Your Identity)
Year by year, the importance of the internet grows. Increasingly, it’s become the repository for our content, our data, and many facets of our identity. But, we could lose it all in a moment.
Have you ever tried to move an MP3 to a new computer? You may not be able to, because we’ve lost control of our digital properties. In the ’00s, MSN and Yahoo both shut down their music stores, terminating their customers’ ability to download their purchases. But, the problem was worse than that: since the stores locked their downloads with DRM software, music owners no longer could move their music from one computer to another! You’d never allow a seller of music CDs to determine where you were allowed to play your songs, but we’ve accepted it as normal on the internet.
In a DRM world, e-tailers control your content, not you.
Have you ever wondered how online ads are so eerily prescient? It’s because we’ve lost control of our demographic data to ad networks. They correlate thousands of facts derived from our searches, purchases, and interests and use that to model who we are. Sometimes you’ll even see ads for things you were just thinking about—and that serendipity can be truly terrifying.
In a commercial online world, ad networks control your data, not you.
Have you ever been booted from a forum or social network? It soon becomes obvious that your access represents something more than just a web site login: without it, you lose access to a whole community of friends, and you can even lose access to other web sites that you logged into through your network account. Losing access to a social network can actually mean losing your digital identity.
In an interconnected world, social networks control your digital identity, not you.
Have you ever been exposed by an online data breach? Data breaches have become commonplace in the twenty-first century. Every year, numerous companies lose reams of data to digital intruders. But it’s not the companies who are paying the cost, it’s us. As a result of those data breaches, which you have no control over, you might be the victim of financial theft or identity theft. You could literally lose everything.
In an online world, data collectors control the security of your content, data, and digital identity, not you.
How did we arrive at a world where we don’t control our data or our content? Where everything is subject to the terms and conditions of companies, with no options for alternatives?
The answer is simple: centralization.
Centralization: A Cautionary Vision of the Past
Centralization was one of the major trends of the Industrial Age. As life moved beyond the village square, as local economies became global economies, entrepreneurs founded corporations to take advantage of the world’s waxing globalization. These singular entities combined specialization with economies of scale: the bigger they grew, the better they got at their areas of expertise. As they streamlined, they consolidated entire industries, making them centralized.
“Social security numbers weren’t issued in the United States until 1935, but now they’ve become a de facto national identifier.”
Banks, credit unions, and brokerage firms centralized access to your money, your stocks, your bonds, your mortgages, and your other financial instruments. This allowed them to better leverage those monies for their own purposes. Credit agencies centralized access to your credit history. This allowed them to offer more comprehensive products to their customers. Department stores centralized access to goods. This allowed them to enjoy better discounts on purchases and to regularize shipping networks.
Government was part of this centralization too. Social security numbers weren’t issued in the United States until 1935, but now they’ve become a de facto national identifier. The FBI’s National Crime Information Center database only came online in 1967. The national fingerprint system, the FBI’s IAFIS, was quite a late comer, appearing in 1999. In all of these cases, government saw how creating and controlling access to these centralized data repositories could allow them to better meet their core objectives, whether it was tracking payments into a social security system, facilitating information flow about crimes, or tracking criminals.
Now, the Digital Age is continuing the trend of centralization. Using the immense powers of computers to store, correlate, and analyze information, twenty-first century companies are able to create even greater levels of centralization.
Social networks centralize access to your friends and families and sometimes to other web sites and networks as well. Ad networks centralize extensive résumés of your online usage: who you are, what you search for, what you buy, and what you talk about—all linked into centralized databases that may know you better than you do! E-tailers centralize your access to digital assets, controlling when you can use and transfer them.
In other words, computers have allowed the trend of centralization to go exponential.
The Dangers of Centralization
The centralization of the Industrial Age is dangerous enough: an incorrect credit report might require months or years of effort to correct and a simple name change could be stalled out by a single bureaucrat having a bad day. But, as the Digital Age draws the whole world ever closer together, the danger grows even greater.
“Though this scandal has often been viewed as a data breach, it’s really an example of the misuse of centralized data … The problem wasn’t necessarily Facebook’s data policy, but rather the huge honey-pot of data available there.”
You can lose your digital content when a centralized entity controls it. Digital assets, such as MP3s, PDFs, and ebooks, have all been endangered by centralization. An e-tailer might decide that you shouldn’t have access to a digital asset that you purchased, such as when Amazon arbitrarily (and ironically) deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their customers’ Kindle devices because it couldn’t legally be sold in the United States. That doesn’t even speak to a broader danger: if Amazon should ever decide that they don’t want you as a customer, they can close down your account, and suddenly every book that was sitting at Amazon, rather than on your Kindle reader, would no longer be available to you.
Your digital data can be correlated and misused when a centralized entity controls it. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica harvested the profiles of 87 million Facebook users. The demographic data they harvested was then used to influence several elections, most notably the UK Brexit vote and the US election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Though this scandal has often been viewed as a data breach, it’s really an example of the misuse of centralized data: Cambridge Analytica used a simple Facebook app that required users to proactively consent to the harvesting of their data (and, as it happens, the data of all of their friends). The problem wasn’t necessarily Facebook’s data policy, but rather the huge honey-pot of data available there.
You can be denied your digital identity when a centralized entity controls it. When Facebook established the first iteration of their real-name policy in 2014, it was immediately disparaged for denying the names of transgender individuals as well as Native Americans and certain other ethnic minorities: Facebook was literally rejecting their digital identity. Because Facebook had all the power, there was no appeals court. Worse, there was no real equivalent product: if a person wanted to connect with friends on Facebook, it was their way or nothing.
You have no say over the security of your content, your data, and your identity when a centralized entity controls it. In 2013, cyber attackers stole the credit card information for 40 million customers from Target department stores. In 2017, the Equifax credit agency lost personally identifiable information, including social security numbers, of 143 million people to another cyber breach. In 2018, Marriott exposed personally identifiable information including names, passport numbers, and dates of birth for 327 million people. The data breaches are getting worse and worse. That’s in part because these centralized entities have huge honey pots of valuable personal information, but also because these data stores are hard to properly maintain and protect: even Google can’t do so!
The Dangers of Trust
But do you personally need to worry about centralization? If you trust your content holder, your social networks, the ad networks, your government, and whatever other centralized companies or bureaucracies you work with, then it’s OK right?
The problem is …
You have to trust their staff. Though a company or a government might have reasonable policies for protecting your data or your content, that entity is made up of lots of individuals. You can’t be sure that every individual is going to agree with and uphold the views of the company and that their needs and desires will align with yours. And the more centralized an entity is, the bigger it is, and so the more opportunity there is for individuals to have widely divergent interests.
“Though you might trust the current people running and a company or government, are you sure that you’ll also be able to trust the people who run it in 5 years? 10? 20?”
You have to trust their competency. Even if a company or government says they’re going to protect your data or content, you have to trust in their ability to do so. You have to believe that they won’t create a system where friends can give away their friends’ data (like Facebook did) or where bugs might expose data (like everyone else has done). You have to believe that even if they’re not transparent, they’re honest. And the most centralized an entity is, the more attack space there is, and the more opportunity there is for data to be lost.
You have to trust their future. Though you might trust the current people running and staffing a company or government, are you sure that you’ll also be able to trust the people who run it in five years? Ten? Twenty? Just consider all of the US Dreamers who gave their data to the Obama administration, then feared it would be misused by the Trump administration. Or all the Europeans who gave their census data to their state in the ’40s, only to have it used against them by the Nazis.
Wouldn’t it be better to just trust yourself?
Decentralization: An Alternate Vision of the Present
Reversing the trends of the last few centuries won’t be easy, but the internet has brought a new democratization to the world that makes it possible. By working together, we can create new systems of rights on the internet that aren’t beholden to a centralized power. We can assure our self-sovereignty, where we control our data and truly own our content.
That begins with creating processes that are distributed, where their work is shared across many computer and many networks. However, we must also take the next step and create processes that are decentralized. They must be dependent upon no one person or entity, but instead governed by the people who use them and by the rules those people create.
“It allows you to control your data and your content, to determine how its secured.”
Decentralization has already taken many forms on the internet. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, not controlled by any bank or financial institution; it allows people to make purchases without the possibility of censorship (and with some measure of privacy). Namecoin is a decentralized name service; it allows people to access web sites without them being blocked. DIDs are decentralized identifiers, the anchors for self-sovereign identities that are controlled by the people; they allow people to create digital identity that can’t be refused or reclaimed.
Decentralization can also address some of those problems that led off this article: the possible loss of your music, your books, and your very identity to centralized networks. It allows you to control your data and your content, to determine how its secured. That’s where the Bitmark Property System, a decentralized property registration system, comes in: it’s been designed to protect your digital assets and data against these very problems. Examining it in more depth can further reveal the power of decentralization.
Decentralizing an Account
A Bitmark account records the ownership of your digital assets and data. It can also be used to transfer or license your digital properties. However, unlike a traditional property system such as a mortgage company, Bitmark does all of this in a decentralized fashion, using the power of the blockchain.
The blockchain is an immutable shared ledger. It’s kind of like a database, except anyone can write to it; meanwhile, no one can remove anything from a blockchain, making it a permanent record of everything that’s ever occurred within its sphere of influence.
“There’s no gatekeeper who controls access to the blockchain and no entity that’s required to keep it running.”
This all works because of the “consensus rules” that govern the blockchain. These are specific, transparent methods and regulations that all blockchain users must follow. They’re also what allow the blockchain to be decentralized: a whole legion of computers can read from the blockchain and write to it, as long as they follow the rules. There’s no gatekeeper who controls access to the blockchain and no entity that’s required to keep it running.
A Bitmark account thus utilizes the Bitmark blockchain to record your property and its usage in a decentralized ledger that will never go away.
Decentralizing Your Access
Even more importantly, access to a Bitmark account is also managed in a decentralized way. This is in sharp contrast to banks, credit unions, credit bureaus, social networks, and e-tailers—all of whom control access to your data and your properties, and thus can arbitrarily decide to deny your access. By moving access away from a centralized entity, you ensure that your data and properties can’t be denied to you by someone else.
“Rather than a company saying who you are, you get to say so yourself!”
Decentralized access is managed through a private key that you hold, which identifies who you are. This isn’t like a social media account, where the social media company authenticates you; instead you authenticate yourself. Rather than a company saying who you are, you get to say so yourself!
Using your decentralized key, you can nimbly move among a variety of apps created by Bitmark to access your Bitmark account. But, you could also use it to work with any third-party solutions created by other companies—or even something written by yourself. The power of decentralization gives you all of the control!
And if you ever lose your private key, you can recreate it. By entering a set of 12 short words that you recorded when you created your account, you can always retrieve access to your decentralized account on the Bitmark blockchain. Think of it as a better way to manage account access than all those passwords that probably drive you crazy—the ones that you constantly lose, forcing you to jump through hoops to retrieve them, or maybe even to create new accounts! Instead, you have a stored private key that you never have to think about, and if you do lose it, the 12 short words that you wrote down will bring it back.
Together, your decentralized key and your decentralized account give you absolute authority over your digital assets and data records. You are beholden to no terms and conditions, and there are no limits on your usage of your own digital properties or data. You can buy, sell, license, and trade as you want—all under your full control.
Independence: A Hopeful Vision of the Future
Imagine now, a vision of the near future, where the new trend of decentralization has overcome two centuries of centralization. Blockchains rule the internet, storing data in immutable public ledgers. Property registration, identity information, and digital assets have all moved from centralized silos to these new decentralized chains.
You control everything from your smart phone or from a digital fob that you can plug into your computer—either of which is unlocked by your personal fingerprint. Your device contains private keys and digital identifiers that allow you to control your digital assets, your personal data, and your very identity. You can choose how to use them: you could rent out the digital artwork you created, donate your personal data for medical research, or sell demographic information to advertisers—but only if you choose to.
“You are the ultimate arbiter of your digital destiny.”
Where once you could lose your digital properties to a company that went bankrupt or closed down its digital repositories, where once you could be victim to malfeasance within a company, where once you were just one of millions damaged by digital breaches, now you instead are the ultimate arbiter of your digital destiny.
Certainly, there will be challenges. Certainly, you will need to shoulder new responsibilities to protect your digital properties. But the freedom of digital independence should make those new obligations worthwhile a hundredfold.
The Bitmark Property System is just one building block in this vision of a decentralized future, but we believe that exerting control over your digital assets and data is one of the most important stepping stones in this new digital revolution.
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You can learn more about the Bitmark property blockchain and how to register your data and digital assets as personal property at bitmark.com.
