Ruby Protocol — Time to Manage Your Data And Privacy
Yes. Your data is the new holy grail of the 21st century. It has become synonymous with privacy, time, energy, attention, and individual sovereignty. Data sort of elegantly encapsulates all of that into one single four-letter word.
As the writers of this post, we are often dumbfounded by the brevity of this word, and how many untold stories it contains.
We moderns now live our lives online, anywhere, and all the time. It’s just a reality of modern life. We know it, and you know it.
Years later, experts, scholars, and activists finally coined the term — Attention Economy to forthrightly face the awkward reality.
Attention, the “bottleneck of human thought”, is one of our most valuable resources. It guides and shapes your decisions, perceptions, and realities, and everyone wants a piece of it: the internet, apps, politicians and advertisers, influencers, and friends. We know that advertisers are paying for our attention and social media networks are getting savvier at capturing it for profits. Many of us admit wholeheartedly that we are more mindlessly addicted to the internet than ever before, thanks to the way the global pandemic abruptly folded our parallel worlds into the glowing rectangles of handheld devices.
“ A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. ”
Fortunately, people are beginning to realize the gravity of this problem. Many leading jurisdictions have started to hire chief privacy officers, granting them a seat at the table alongside agency leaders and technical staff at the outset of a project to ensure the protection of citizen data is adequately considered. It’s a good start indeed.
However, everything about human history tells us not to repose too much hope and trust in bureaucracy. The complicated set of rules in a bureaucratic system often causes long delays and can often lead to inefficiency. And its rigidity often leads to opting for programmed decisions while newer avenues are not explored.
Time to Price Your Data And Privacy
Many firms understand the value of our scarce attention and are adapting their business models to capitalize on it. For instance, music streaming services like Spotify have two revenue streams; you can either monetarily pay for ads to disappear, or pay with your attention and listen to ads. These are the only two choices you have. Either you pay to save your attention span, or you spend it to save a little bit of money.
The same techniques are used in advertising as well where ad placements are priced and sold based on impressions. Whether that impression lasts 1 second, 1 minute, or 10 minutes.
Obviously, your data, privacy, and attention are valuable commodities that are being traded every day.
We argue that to reclaim control of your data and privacy, we need to grasp the managing power firmly. And the more of us decide to do that to our data and the more valuable it becomes. It should be a collective effort.
In this context, Ruby Protocol is the tool that helps us fight for our data. It will design a layer-1 protocol that utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership.
Our technology aims to give users the power to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
And to protect users’ data privacy, when the users upload their encrypted private data to the cloud, through privacy-preserving machine learning and labeling based on functional encryption, the Web 2.0 cloud computing business model via selling users’ privacy will be revolutionized.
References:
https://www.govtech.com/opinion/what-is-the-price-of-privacy.html
https://www.raptitude.com/2009/03/the-only-resource-more-precious-than-time/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
https://lifehacker.com/treat-your-attention-as-a-resource-to-budget-it-more-ef-1691243446
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/it-takes-faith-resist-attention-economy
https://econreview.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/
https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/attention-economics/
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a cross-chain, privacy-first infrastructure, powered by Polkadot. Our layer-1 protocol utilizes Functional Encryption (FE) cryptography, which allows users to adopt a modular approach to data privacy and ownership. This novel solution will allow users to encrypt sensitive information on-chain, which can only be decrypted by holders of an approved private key.
Ruby’s FE Substrate-pallet will serve as the building blocks for privacy-first smart contract DApps building on the native Ruby Chain, while also acting as a privacy layer for Parachains and Web3 DApps across the Polkadot ecosystem.
