Today’s debate in society about the right balance between privacy and security is extremely misguided. The assumption is that society cannot afford privacy because it would jeopardize security, but it turns out that privacy is not only an advantage to the individual. It is an essential component of adaptable communities that need to recognize evolving aspirations by their members. A society that does not respect privacy becomes rigid, incapable of adapting to future needs, and breaks apart.
If I loved an African-american woman and you were my friends wanting to help me to marry her, what would be the year that this would constitute a criminal conspiracy in the United States? In 1965 you would be all criminals, in 1966 the same. Then magically in 1967, when interracial marriage in the US was legalized, it would be all OK.
A minority opinion under the all-seeing eyes of a society disrespecting privacy gets stomped out, and never gains the chance to eventually grow through thoughtful debate into a majority opinion, where through the democratic process it then become a legally recognized norm. Such a society will be unable to adapt to the changing needs of its constituents. It will become rigid, and with the widening gap between what it insists the people should do, and what actually people believe the right behavior is, it will break apart.
Whether in a corporate environment, in your private life, or in a public interest organization, it is your responsibility to healthily and carefully manage your information. Blockchain technologies have become the basis for a new generation of software that is inherently decentralized. As such, when properly designed and properly implemented, they naturally provide a manner to avoid the convenient vulnerabilities of centralized data stores where it is possible to collect larger and larger haystacks looking for better needles.
FortKnoxster is ambitious in setting up a series of functions in a unified environment that very strongly protects data, very strongly protects privacy. Based on the blockchain and a peer-to-peer architecture, it aims to be adopted by a large number of users. Making these applications user-friendly, making sure that people care about how they communicate, and whether the information that they exchange is sufficiently protected is a very useful ambition not only for those that work with secret information. Everybody’s information should deserve the same kind of protection, regardless of whether you are talking about the security of a nation-state or just the recipes that two housewives exchange with each other.
(Disclosure: I am an Investor and Advisor to FortKnoxster.)