In February last year we hired a car in Faro, Portugal and the car hire company was Klass Wagen. I received an email this morning that their systems had a cyber attack and that personal data including mine was stolen.
Privacy of our personal data is something we should all take seriously and we expect those companies we deal with do so as well. Personal data is big business these days and this year is projected to be worth more than $500 billion.
We see all these data centers popping up everywhere and there is very good reason for this as this is the new big business. The average business will pay anywhere from $1-$5 for your personal data so just think the next time you purchase a car how much the company is making from all the extra add ons as they sell this information off to other companies.
The more sinister side of things like in this case my passport and drivers license could be worth far more depending on how it is used. I would suggest that the information hacked would be used for selling on for company usage as they do not have in this case my bank details or card details.
We hear privacy spoken about quite regularly in the crypto space and it is the most important part that has been preventing crypto being mass adopted. The idea that having the blockchain transactions transparent for all to see was a great idea were wrong on all counts as this is the exact opposite of what businesses desire and why they could not use the blockchains as we know them currently.
A few months back the Ethereum Alliance did a review on privacy being developed on the Ethereum blockchain and out of the 7 privacy protocols being developed COTI was the only one that was ready in the advanced stage. COTI was classified in the General Availability stage with all the others still in the Pilot stage so this highlights in many ways how far off we are when it comes to protecting not only our transactions, but our personal data.
When we think of privacy we tend to think of blockchain and crypto yet it goes much further than that as this privacy tech can be used for any login based platform. I can recall the likes of Samsung having discussions with COTI looking at ways to include their Garbled Circuits technology to help keep their users s safe.
Privacy is required in anything we sign up with online and should just be standard and a prerequisite of every company wanting to take your personal details. Thankfully I was never one of those to be lured into the likes of Facebook because they will know so much on every user through the actions they do and will most likely be tracking way more without you even knowing.
I wish we had privacy technology already that would hide and encrypt our info because it should remain private and those data companies should not be using our information. COTI will hopefully be live on AVAX in a few weeks time followed shortly by Ethereum which should then snowball to other blockchains and businesses. Not only am I wanting this because I invested into COTI, but we need it desperately for our online/crypto eco system to keep our data private.
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