Web3 and the future of data portability: Rethinking user experiences and incentives on the internet - Help Net Security

In web3, the promise is that a user can retain ownership and control over their data. The dominant narrative goes: “The gatekeepers of web2 have taken your data and used it against you! Now it’s time to fight back!” Such argument from web3 enthusiasts is met with A LOT of resistance as data effectively becomes a currency that can be leveraged by a ... See more

Web2 identity solutions are centralised. You give your identity data to third party providers. As a result, there is a security and privacy risk. With Web3, you would be the single owner of your identity data. Your credentials would be stored on-chain and validated once by credential verifiers. Third party services which want to verify your identit... See more

web3 introduces the opportunity to create software infrastructure that is free to use forever, and that anyone can build on top of, but that rewards “the builders and participants for creating and contributing to these invaluable systems that serve society at large for many years to come.” Customers want low prices, fast delivery, and vast selectio... See more

The main advantage of Web 3 is that it attempts to address the biggest problem that has resulted from Web 2: the collection of personal data by private networks which are then sold to advertisers or potentially even stolen by hackers.

Some claim web3 is about ownership, but it is more appropriate to say that web3 is about wealth. Very little in the web3 advocacy space addresses how it will match Web 1.0 and 2.0’s successes in terms of discoverability and sharing. It offers little by way of guarantee that it will protect its users' digital rights, in some cases making them much w... See more

This is, admittedly, a very powerful idea. The challenges of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 around ownership, censorship, and digital rights are highly nontrivial ones. For web3 enthusiasts, these issues are existential threats to the web, threats that web3 will eradicate simply by eliminating the question. There can be no debate on the power or responsibilit... See more