Who Controls Your Digital Life?

By Björn Tackmann

As more elements of our lives move online, the amount and value of the data we amass also grows rapidly. Our communication in emails, messengers, and social media apps, our identity information, and just so much more — all this data is now online, moving seamlessly between our devices.

To achieve this, however, all that data must be stored somewhere, on some computer. If that’s not your computer, it is someone else’s. That means this “someone else” who controls that computer is ultimately in control of your data. Someone else also decides what you get to do with your data. You might even lose access.

But there’s more: that someone else who is in control also decides who else gets access. Your data has long been used to target you with advertisements to make you buy more stuff you don’t need. If you’ve read any of the end-user license agreement updates you’ve probably signed off on over the last year, you will have seen that many companies now also claim the right to train their AI on your data.

What’s the Alternative?

Running your own services is actually hard. Operating your own infrastructure involves hours and hours of work.

The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) enables services to be built in a different way. It allows you to store your code and data without giving up control, so you are still in charge. It also accomplishes this without requiring you to operate your own infrastructure.

Fundamentally, you can think of ICP as a computing platform built around the concept of ownership for code and data: a sovereign cloud, a true World Computer.

This is achieved by building on a decentralized network. ICP is based on the same underlying principle as Bitcoin. However, more than a thousand person-years of research and development efforts have enabled the Internet Computer Protocol to expand how decentralized technology is used. This technology is no longer a simple token ledger for monetary transactions. Its use now includes a full-fledged computing platform that can host all your code and data and keep you in control.

Data sovereignty is in your hands with ICP.

Join us on our journey toward the World Computer.

Learn More:

• Discover the Internet Computer at internetcomputer.org.
• Watch tutorials on the DFINITY YouTube channel.
• For developers, start building today at icp.ninja.

This article is adapted from a World Computer Tech Talk by Björn Tackmann, Head of Research at the DFINITY Foundation. You can watch the original video here*.*

Who Controls Your Digital Life? was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.