Metadata: At the Heart of Surveillance Capitalism
Data collection has dominated Silicon Valley’s business models over the past decade and has quickly become the standard for monetizing online activity. Understanding and predicting user behavior is now central to both traditional and new media companies—from the Financial Times to Facebook, which is known for selling its users’ data to commercial clients such as Cambridge Analytica.
These data-driven models, collectively known as surveillance capitalism, have given rise to giant tech monopolies that oversee an unprecedented system of control. Meanwhile, governments are struggling to maintain centralized power and manage polarized populations by heavily censoring and controlling the internet, thereby further fragmenting it.
In this climate, the prospect of having privacy online is crumbling. It is important to realize just how inadequate current technology is for protecting privacy. A private messaging app like Signal can encrypt the content of a message, but the metadata identifying the time, sender, and recipient is accessible to powerful third parties who monitor the internet and can easily identify users.
In this world of big data, this information is in many ways more valuable than the content of messages—it can be used by sophisticated, ubiquitous analytical systems to determine the nature of your social relationships and thereby predict your personal characteristics and preferences.
The technology needed to ensure online privacy has remained underdeveloped until now due to limitations in computing, networking, research, and funding. With Nym, it is now possible to overcome these limitations and deploy technology that offers strong privacy guarantees, avoids trusted third parties, and resists surveillance.
In 2019, a team of researchers and programmers working in the field of privacy-enhancing technologies founded Nym to create a privacy-protecting infrastructure that could put an end to the surveillance of users’ personal data by companies and governments.
What is the difference between a VPN and Nym's mix network?
The most popular network-level privacy solution today is a VPN (virtual private network), which provides network-level protection through an encrypted tunnel between a user’s computer and a VPN provider’s server. However, VPNs are often misconfigured, and even when configured correctly, they do not offer true privacy protection or sufficient resistance to censorship.
VPN providers can also monitor all network traffic between users and the public internet, knowing exactly which services users are accessing at any given time. Users must be certain that the VPN provider does not misuse their information and does not keep logs.
The “mix” network is an anonymous overlay network that provides strong anonymity at the network level, even against powerful systems capable of passively monitoring the entire network. The “mix” network is decentralized and has no trusted third party; therefore, it does not require a trusted provider such as a VPN.
Unlike Facebook Connect and similar authentication-based services such as “Sign in with Google,” traditional usernames and passwords, or even public/private key pairs, Nym credentials allow users to authenticate themselves and authorize data sharing without voluntarily revealing any information to a third party. There is no central third party managing the identifiers, and users retain full control over their own data, sharing it only with those they choose. A user can store their data wherever they want (including on their own devices), and unlike other solutions such as the W3C’s decentralized identifiers, a user does not store anything on the blockchain, which offers greater privacy protection.