Your social data is being held hostage. There's something you can do about it.
Your social data is being held hostage. There's something you can do about it.
We capitulate to the terms of service agreement and click 'agree'—offering up our personal data for free to the social network powers that be...enter web3.
Social networks today hold you hostage in a walled garden. You have a fun(?) time hanging out in Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but you start all over again if you create a Tiktok account.
Within each, you can’t control the content they serve you. When you scroll or swipe, you consume what Youtube or ByteDance and their algorithm wants you to.
When you’ve had enough and want out, that’s okay. But leave behind your following, social data, and history. That is social network property, not yours.
Your digital life is held hostage—are you okay with that?
So what if Meta owns your data in Facebook? They provide the service for free; it’s a fair exchange.
Sure. But think about how digital is increasingly capturing more of our daily life and attention. How do you feel about someone having complete control of what happens to your family photos, memories, chat, interactions, and likes?
How do you feel about a single entity dictating the content you consume through your feed everyday? Are you still going to be okay with that when you have 5, 10, 50 years worth of memories and information stuck in their systems?
What if you could move your following and social data?
For an individual, this means your connections, interactions, and preferences can be extracted from Facebook, Instagram, etc.
For a creator or business, this means your following, content, and reputation can be taken from Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.
Things suddenly become interesting.
A few examples on opportunities when you can ‘move’ your data with you.
Control your data
This isn’t ground-breaking. You simply have more control on who stores or has access to your data. If you don’t want your data to stay in Meta’s databases, then that should be easy to do!
Web3 Smart-contract wallets are trying to do this.
Sell your data
If an app wants to access and use your data, shouldn’t you be able to charge for that? In practice this probably doesn’t mean a company gives you a significant amount of money, but at least a clear upfront proposition that you can get X months free subscription or something similar for the privilege of taking a peek at your personal information.
Choose your algorithm
Let’s take it a step further and get fancy data scientists to build a social algorithm that we like, not what Meta or Tiktok wants us to use.
Want content served by recency, not your search history? Can do.
Prefer to combine Tiktok + Twitter content recommendations? Possible.
Want a complicated formula to show you movie recommendations you like, but tweak it so that it favors Kpop series on weekends and documentaries on weekdays? If someone makes an algorithm for that, you can use it.
Personalize your feed or dashboard
To cap it all off, maybe you want the full-screen swiping experience of Tiktok but for text-based Twitter-like content? Or maybe you want Tiktok videos, but be able to choose it like in Youtube?
If someone builds that front-end, then you can just move your web3 data and connections to use that user interface and experience instead.
Choose your own adventure.
Uhh… okay so why blockchain?
Well if you haven’t noticed, this is a blockchain/web3 blog. Obviously I’ll be plugging web3 like a crazy person. 😇
Yes, this isn’t a new problem and initiatives like The Data Transfer Project exist. But a roadblock is:
“…no data portability standard for cloud service providers”
Which is fair enough! The data infrastructure of each app would most likely be different. Enter web3.
Blockchain is interesting because it sort of solves this ‘portability’ standard. A lot of things in blockchain is standardized such that apps can be composable. That is, apps can plug into each other like legos and you can easily move your data from one app to another.
Sound familar?
Be an owner, not a hostage
A very interesting project tackling exactly this is the Lens Protocol. Their website explains it well, “With Lens Protocol, you are in control. You own your profile, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. That means you have the power over your content, and it’s all right there, as an NFT, in your wallet. It’s not just easy. It’s how digital identity should be: yours.”
Dive into web3 💪
Post inspired by the podcast from Delphi Podcast, Lens Protocol: The User-Owned, Open Social Graph Enabling Composable Social Applications
Disagree with something in this article? Hit me up! I love to learn through discussion and debate.
I also post web3 stuff in Twitter: @nigelwtlee