The right to never be forgotten

The word itself ‘privacy’ doesn’t appear even once in the American Constitution, and as a legal principle, it wasn’t until 1890 that Louis Brandeis formulated it in a way we would recognize today. The spark for Brandeis’ historic treatise was the sudden emergence of the telegraph and portable cameras; more specifically, his socialite law partner Sa... See more

If your personal data makes it onto some public blockchain, it’s likely on many machines spread all over the world, with no singular entity able or willing to take the ‘controller’ liability bullet. That’s the ‘nobody’: there’s no ‘real or legal person’ the EU can nail to the wall for not deleting data or whatever else their precious GDPR stipulate... See more

The challenge before us is to figure out the ground rules of privacy in Web 3, where the ‘contextual privacy’ that has shaped both user expectations and government regulation in Web 2 no longer hold at all; in fact, they’re utterly fipped.

Now, let’s imagine you leave your doctor’s office and fire up Instagram to take your mind off the diagnosis he just gave you, which is that you don’t have brain cancer but you simply suffer from chronic migraines and will just have to deal. Scrolling past pictures of friends and celebrities, you see an advertisement for a migraine medication, speci... See more

Conversely in Web 3, absolutely everything I do ‘online’ (whatever that means now; what do we even do anymore that isn’t online in some form or another?) is public and immutably recorded for all to see. Imagine for a moment Web 2 worked that way: every time you bought something at Amazon, the company broadcasted it publicly, tweeting it out perhaps... See more

Some Web 2 companies like Uber still aren’t profitable, years after their founding and having gone public. We used to find this odd—trolls are nothing new and they railed against the early Web 2 companies too—but now we’ve simply gotten use to it. Web 3 has yet to prove out its flipped model for utility vs. speculative value.

In Web 3, companies achieve liquidity early via ‘tokenomics’ and other novel mechanisms to raise capital from users (often highly speculative in nature), and build the necessary technical infrastructure to create an alternative internet: decentralized servers, identity-management ‘wallets’, token exchanges allowing easy movement among various ecosy... See more