Privacy concerns about the Internet have been around since it broke into the mainstream from the academic world. But, for decades, the voices warning us about the dangers inherent in it were considered little more than prophets of doom, paranoid maniacs yelling in the desert. But then, the likes of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, and changed the game.
Concerns about privacy and the big-brotherish Internet surveillance have skyrocketed after Snowden’s revelations. The “marginal” issues raised by the “prophets of dooms” so long ago are now central to many Internet users worldwide.
The primary question in every concerned user’s mind is: what can I do to protect my privacy, then? So naturally, using a VPN is one of the most common answers (these days, even The Pirate Bay’s website encourages its users to adopt a VPN). So, it shouldn’t surprise us how the VPN market has exploded in recent years.
Covid-19 Further Highlights Online Privacy Concerns
Then the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, pouring fuel into the fire. After that, online digital activities grew exponentially as millions of people worldwide found themselves confined, needing to work from home. They began doing everything through Zoom meetings, and cloud computing. Learning on the fly about the privacy implications of their everyday activities.
So, the previous indifference to privacy issues has become an obsession for many. Suddenly, everything we say or do has potentially tragic privacy implications, and the world is in constant danger.
And if everything and anything can influence everybody’s privacy, new technologies have even more potential to do so, like the blockchain.
Blockchain technology has been a subject as volatile as privacy – if not more so. The ideas behind Bitcoin’s structure crawled out of the cryptocurrency subculture into the computer science’s mainstream. It seemed that this new way of doing things had the potential to…
