Blockchains Alone Won't Fix the Facebook Problem

The crush of photographers clamoring for a shot of the Facebook CEO was a reminder that Congressmen would frame their inquiry into the social media platform's use and abuse of its users' data around the man himself.

We need to tackle the root structural problem of the social media industry: the centralization of control over data and content and the reason why the internet economy has insidiously fostered it.

Any truly decentralized blockchain won't have the on-chain capacity to handle the masses of data and billions of posts that any large-scale system would run.

As a number of critics of blockchain-for-social media point out, the technology on its own won't protect the privacy of user data.

Once users place it in an open platform, any outside party can mine their data and do what they want with it.

That's what the founders of high-tech encryption provider Enigma argued in a recent blog post, entitled "Why Blockchain Alone Can't Fix Facebook." They proposed the development of "a complete privacy protocol," a layered structure that includes both blockchain technology and "Secure computation" to keep people's private information obscured even as the system assures the accuracy of data transactions and currency transfers.

Quite apart from these practical considerations much of the debate over decentralized social media solutions misses the core point: the need for business models that are relevant to an online economy in which data is the central currency.

Blindly believing we were getting services for free, we've been "Paying" the biggest internet companies for years, handing over troves of valuable data and then losing control over it as it disappears out of sight and is transformed by the platforms' secret, proprietary algorithms.

Until now, the problem has been that, without a consensus mechanism to keep an accurate record of all the "Transactions" in this new currency and thus to resolve our inherent mistrust of each other, we've been unable to install a decentralized, peer-to-peer economy around the valuation of that data.

The first step in reducing the power of these internet behemoths must be to use the kind of decentralized trust models that blockchains enable to make their data aggregation monopolies redundant.