The State of Privacy & Private Payment And Ruby PoC
Privacy — A Rekted Fundamental Human Right
It goes without saying that privacy is a fundamental human right and that any law-abiding individuals have a right to be free from any form of surveillance. So one of the most significant privacy advocates said in an interview in an effort to wake the world up, and what he said is bound to echo for years.
“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
Anyone with some life experience knows there was a time when people had secrets. Men and women could share a moment of peace and chat with whomever they wanted to without worrying about whether the conversation would be leaked and boomerang on them. But times have changed, even if behaviors haven’t.
Shopping, chatting, and traveling in the digital age means that habits and relationships are all recorded somewhere in the names of convenience, speed, and efficiency — whether people know it or not.
Computers Are Terrible at Keeping Privacy
Millions, if not billions of people, thought they had some privacy until hackers exploited the highly centralized system with hoarded data, exposing their names, addresses, credit card payments, and gradually their lives.
People who think of the above statement as an exaggeration don’t know that every single year since the birth of the modern internet, there has been at least one major privacy breach.
- In 2013 and 2014, Yahoo announced that data breaches exposed the personal information of all 3 billion user accounts.
- From 2015 to 2016, the second-largest health insurer in the United States, Anthem, announced that a data breach had exposed the personal information of 78.8 million customers, including social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and employment information, as well as income data.
- In 2017, the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that a data breach had exposed the personal information of 147 million people, including social security numbers, birth dates, and addresses.
- In 2018, it was revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent. The data was allegedly used to influence voter opinion and behavior during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- Rinse and repeat…
Your Information & Your Money & Your Life
Privacy is not a profound philosophical idea. Instead, for the ordinary Joe, it is simply what you control.
In today’s digital era, protecting one’s privacy often means having control over one’s data, especially when it comes to data collected and shared by third parties, and understanding the services of different platforms and services we use. And when that is compromised, there is a giant black hole in your life that is ready to suck all your energy.
“Just my name and date of birth. What is the big deal?”
When you lose control over your name and date of birth, it is only a matter of time before you lose another form of information — Your Money.
What is Money? Money is completing a developmental arc from matter to bits, stored in computer memory and magnetic strips, world finance coursing through the global nervous system. Even when Money seemed to be material treasure, heavy in pockets, ships’ holds, and bank vaults, it always was information. Coins, notes, shekels, and cowries were just short-lived technologies for tokenizing information.
The Mantra “Your Money Equals to Your Life” is not advocating a materialistic viewpoint but shines a light on the underlying logic that if you do not have solid control over that tokenized information, you are not the owner of your life.
Just don’t pretend to be.
And just for your information, FTX’s Bahamian company spent a staggering amount of money on luxury hotels and accommodation, flights, and food in the nine months before the exchange’s collapse, court filings have revealed.
And when central banks print money as it has done in recent years? It gives the illusion of infinite resources and thus encourages all economic actors to produce and consume more and more.
An Attempt to Solve it From Ground Up — Ruby PoC
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. To regain control, we must fight a long and hideous battle against the incumbent systems, those fighting to maintain power in the status quo, and the attachment people have to its familiarity, no matter how much they’ve been cheated.
To bring to life the private data management framework for Web 3.0, we build Ruby Protocol’s Proof of Concept as a Layer 2 application that aims to address the most fundamental need of crypto space, which is to enforce cryptographically secure account login, value transfer with guaranteed privacy, and to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving access control while protecting your assets and on-chain data.
📚 Check our 👉 Project Wiki for more details.
💻 Or experience 👉 Ruby Connect now.
With this version of PoC, users can use Ruby Protocol to enforce access control and privacy across different blockchains, and we demonstrate how we can enable transactions with built-in privacy. After several development optimizations to improve user experiences, we reduce the underlying logic to private token minting at a 1:1 ratio on a contract level.
Using Ruby Protocol PoC, users can convert any token into an anonymized version, which is the prerequisite of a private transaction and an essential component in our access-control design. In return, users can convert the anonymized token back into its native form and use them however they see fit.
We consider this PoC version to be very plastic in the sense that it is a first-step technical foundation on which we can build our future private data management system to meet the expanding data needs.
About Us
Ruby Protocol is a private data management framework for Web 3.0 that proposes and implements a privacy layer interacting with the multi-chain ecosystem. It is a fine-grained private data access-control gateway across different entities and organizations in the decentralized and traditional financial world.
