Above: “data privacy” by stockcatalog licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
By Virginia Valenzuela, Arts Editor
ETHDenver begins with waiting in line out in the cold, making new friends on Telegram and getting invited to parties. After administering a covid test and grabbing a wristband, I stand in another line to get into an elevator going up to the 4th floor where the conference was taking place. Outside, a McLaren patterned with the iconic Doge revs its engine.
ETHDenver is a cacophony of languages and accents, NFT enthusiasts and DAO members, noobs and experts, all of them friendly and chatty. Free merch abounds, and every five minutes or so I overhear the first in-person meetings of online comrades. “What brings you here?” is the entry point for nearly every conversation. But isn’t it obvious? The panels with new crypto start-ups, the coders competing in hackathons strewn across the shared spaces, the shortlist of famous names in crypto–like Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot and pplpleasr, the namesake of pleasrDAO–and the opportunities to network with people who share your same interests in Web3.
One of the first panels I went to was on a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about: privacy in the age of the internet. With all of the recent conversations around user data and the ensuing calls for privacy, it is easy to feel like web3 could be our savior, our return to anonymity, and the reclamation of our virtual sovereignty.
The problem is, it’s not.
Adrian Brink is the founder of Anoma, a proof-of-stake blockchain that markets itself as a truly private, “asset-agnostic,” payment platform. Their goal is to ensure that their customers maintain their privacy, even as they send money back and forth between people and parties.
But isn’t blockchain anonymous?
No. Not only is your computer’s IP address tracked by services like MetaMask and Etherscan, thus connecting a geological location to your wallet, but the platforms you use to buy crypto currencies may also share your data as well. Coinbase is one of the largest crypto exchanges in use today, and one of the hot topics at this year’s conference was how they take private data from their users and then share it with other exchanges globally. They’re not the only ones.
According to Brink, one of the biggest problems with modern-day democracy is the lack of privacy afforded to individuals. In fact, when it comes to our public lives, we are as open to the world as ever, whether we engage with social media or not. Search engines track our search history,…
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