NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nowadays, it is common that Internet giants to harvest the enormous amount of personal data emerged from different platforms and use it for business. Social networking companies pursued their users to trade privacy with convenience without mentioning the potential risks of the data breach. It created an unstoppable panopticon Tony Sheng (2019) described:
“Three things are happening simultaneously: (1) we are generating personal data at a rapid and accelerating pace, (2) leaking these data to a growing number of sources through intentional and unintentional means (e.g. hacks) and, (3) developing and improving technologies that can make sense of these vast pools of personal information.
These three things enable Unstoppable Panopticon. ”
Just like internet users have been suffered from the loss of privacy from internet giants such as Facebook and Google. Now the multiple malignant events revealed organizations who collect privacy information are failing to protect users privacy. It is not yet clear what will happen in the future regarding the insufficient system of protecting users’ personal information.
Though many have welcomed blockchain as it has the distributed network with anonymity, it brings the old question of privacy protection - personal data are exposed on the blockchain, unprotected, and traceable. Without precautions it could lead to another future kind of Unstoppable Panopticon. For example, on Ethereum network, the transaction, contract code and input data to contract, the execution result, money sent and received are all public. Several blockchain projects are offering private solutions on the blockchain - Monero, and ZCash worked to solve that problem by providing private transaction features. Although they have achieved private transaction on the blockchain, they did not allow privacy feature for the smart contract.
On the contrary, Origo.Network has developed a complete privacy preserving solution that supports normal hardware for smart contract input and output. In a nutshell, instead of using user’s personal data directly, Origo.Network enables users to generate a cryptographic proof for computation of user’s data and use that proof to demonstrate in any application of who you are.
It might be too early to judge whether Origo.Network is going to stop the unstoppable panopticon in the blockchain age, but it is a promising attempt to unlock a New Era of Blockchain with their Privacy Preserving Smart Contracts.