The current state that the web is in, is fully centralized which means it is prone to security breaches and isn’t private. We need to understand the functionality of the centralized web first in order to grasp why the decentralized web is so important for everyone.
Internet in itself is not centralized as nobody owns the protocols and infrastructure that governs the world wide web. What centralizes the web are service providers of Web 2.0 websites that dominate the market and keep our data.
Social media sites are great and fun to use. They revolutionize social interactions. Things that were expensive before like long distance calls are now available through Facebook free of charge. We can facetime almost everyone provided they also have their Facebook account.
Instead of emails we are now used to chat and send private or direct messages where its recipients are instantly notified about the incoming message. All of this and way more come for a very cheap price that everyone and their brother is willing to pay – personal data.
They hold it and we must agree to it if we want to use the platform. They say we can change it or edit it but customer support among large players like Facebook is almost non-existent. So why is it that we trust these big companies with our personal data? Google and Facebook seem to dominate the web. They will often dictate us what videos to watch and what articles to read based on our performance and sites we visit. These days everything is tracked and measured to provide the ultimate user experience. Such influence give these companies huge power to manipulate users’ interests and can be used in political campaigns as well as other social issues. Google search is told to be algorithmic and objective but who is to say it is not possible to ban certain websites from the search that Google doesn’t like, for example their competitors.
Currently market share of these giants is so big that it is impossible for any other company to compete with them. As we mentioned before these companies are centralized meaning they store store all of their data in a database. It may be backed up and it most certainly is but being a single database makes it vulnerable to cyber attacks. It can most definitely be hacked as Apple cloud was, what resulted in a huge scandal and the leak of thousands of celebrity pictures.
Due to the centralized nature a lot of companies have their data stolen. Among them are banks insurance and the like. Apart from the damage and reputation lots of these companies are often faced with ransom demands. If they don’t pay, they risk the loss of their data what can result in even bigger scandal. A lot of these companies do not even admit to being hacked and pay the ransom quickly in order to avoid public scrutiny.
It is safe to assume that every business that holds somewhat valuable data is at risk of getting hacked. If we are to believe security companies there are more than 300,000 malware created every day. And all of this can be solved by introducing blockchain technology that solves the problem of centralized web.
