Following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, many people are worried about menstruation apps and other digital platforms and applications tracking and giving user information away to government officials and entities. Here is what NFT expert Connor Borrego has to say on if individuals can protect their data from being used against them by government entities, and whether or not NFTs can potentially be used to protect people.
“Free and even paid applications for both consumer and enterprise use, earn a significant portion of their revenue streams by providing functionality that is built off the aggregate pool of user data and monetized via subscription access, or in the worst case scenarios, sold off as raw user transaction level log data at a cost per row; governments are only one of many buying parties. Oftentimes these programs offer little options to confidently opt out of data sharing agreements without losing access to the software, which is why many people believe regulation is necessary, but we believe NFTs can be used as a tool for individual users to make that choice about individual data points, or standardized buckets of them, that are used for well understood business purposes. In the instance of our current situation, the only real way for women to protect themselves from the government weaponizing their data against them for abortion monitoring, is to opt out of the modern convenience of using these applications entirely, and try maybe a home grown solution like a tracker build for excel or even more analog solutions like a pencil based journal, but again don’t store this information in a software with cloud based storage because that would again, potentially expose it to being sold,” says Borrego.
Borrego also explains if NFTs can protect people from their data being used against them or sold and if apps or businesses need NFTs to protect their data from being used.
“Because non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are essentially serials numbers for data like media files and breadcrumb trail information from scattered internet usage, the special properties that blockchain technology adds to it means that users own their data holding it in a new kind of internet profile called a crypto wallet, and can choose to plug it into free, open source applications they know doesn’t resell their information, and thus provide them privacy and functionality, or opting to monetizing and selling their data if they’d like, because there is positive value to be gained from access to that information and the research that can be done with. The more important component is transparency around the market value of different data points, or buckets of them, and the choice for individual users to participate in the buying and selling of their digital identity. Brands have digital identities, as well as have a digital breadcrumb from the operations of their online software systems, so they too benefit from systems that grant them greater privacy or new revenue streams, but the key here is this would be an auditable form of privacy because of blockchain, and transactions around bad actors could be easier to hold accountable. Whether apps need to be more transparent about their data privacy policy or not, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but I do believe that the public, or at the very least their user base, has a right to know the value of their meta data broken out for them, and that the data exists for many software providers to do this with relative ease.”
