Digital sovereignty: Reclaiming your private data in Web3

cointelegraph.com:

As the Fair Data Society puts it, we are laborers in the data economy. Our personal data — basically, the digital blueprint of our lives — gets collected by platforms we interact with, most often in a non-transparent way. At best, it is used to improve our user experience. At worst, our privacy gets breached, monetized and even weaponized against us.

It all started with the emergence and growth of the user-generated web, as seemingly free social media networks, search engines and companies saw a new opportunity of profiting and went into the business of gathering, storing, analyzing and selling user data. By 2022, the data market had grown immensely. According to Statista, a total of 64.2 zettabytes of data had been created, consumed and put online worldwide by 2020. By 2025, this number is expected to exceed 180 zettabytes.

Talking about the evolution of data sovereignty in a profit-driven climate, professor Sabina Leonelli said:

Indeed, over three-quarters of the global search market is under the control of the Google search engine and over 3.6 billion individual users across four social media platforms owned by Meta.

Big Tech companies recognized the pressure and increasing regulatory demand, so in 2018, theData Transfer Project was born. Six contributors — Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and SmugMug — committed to enabling seamless data transfer among platforms via a common framework with open-source code. Still, it was just the first step toward users reclaiming their data.

In the past few years, the demand for transparency, trustlessness, security and decentralization has formed across multiple sectors of our life: from finance to organizational management to data storage. This is evident in the blockchain