Navigating the world of privacy concerns with dApps

Mobile applications today have become an integral part of daily lives and it has become difficult to manage it without them. From meditation to shopping, there is an application for everything. These applications further, are notorious for tracking, storing, and analyzing the data unintentionally fed into them. For instance, for users enabling their locations to receive the usual weather reports, region-wise news, social media updates, etc., companies owning those applications can track the precise locations of those users with sophisticated algorithms and technologies.  

These companies then can sell, use, or analyze the data and can further share it with third parties seeking insights into consumer behavior and other-related metrics. American companies alone are estimated to have spent over $19 billion in 2018 acquiring and analyzing consumer data, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau Research Report. 

The global mobile applications economy has risen significantly as companies have started investing heavily in developing and refining mobile applications. The global mobile application market size was valued at $106.27 billion in 2018, and is projected to reach $407.31 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 18.4 per cent from 2019 to 2026. 

But with the growing revenue in the mobile applications sector, the cases of privacy concerns have also seen a consequential increase. Researchers at Oxford University had examined the inbuilt code in several mobile applications which led to the revelation that the code itself allows for users’ data to be shared widely. Furthermore, it highlighted the centralization of data collection as the majority of the data collected flowed upwards into the hands of only a few companies, primarily Google’s parent company Alphabet, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft.  

Inside the world of Data  

The pandemic had further accelerated the dependency on applications and the digital world itself, with 2020 witnessing almost 64.2 zettabytes of data being created and replicated. According to Kaspersky’s telemetry, when the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the total number of brute force attacks against remote desktop protocol (RDP) witnessed a big jump from 93.1 million worldwide in February 2020 to 277.4 million 2020 in March. This is testament to the ubiquity of an application-driven world and also, to the pervasiveness of threats looming over the data being created.  

All smart devices today are integrated with efficient and sophisticated code which enables them to perform functions unthinkable before. With the advancements in the field of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, etc., the technology sector is flooded with numerous data points that are stored and restricted to a select few organizations. This enables these organizations to gather valuable insights and make the experience of a user more personal, yet it also facilitates hacks and data breaches.     

Enter DApps 

A sustainable solution to tackle this obstacle are decentralized-applications (dApps). dApps not only solves the problem discussed above but also alleviate many problems that are experienced with centralized applications on a daily basis, namely:

Privacy

dApps are built upon blockchain technology which facilitates the decentralization of data. Further, using distributed computing systems ensures user data is not shared and exposed to third parties. 

Censorship

As dApps are decentralized, they are not held by a single entity. Hence, no one can restrict user adoption of dApps or their deployment on any platform.

Downtime

 As dApps are decentralized, it experiences zero downtime which means it is robust and will not fail if one of many computers in the network experiences a sudden crash.

Security

No malicious software or hacker can change the code of dApps as it is fully transparent and available to the public. Hence, to change any line of code, one will require to adhere to a majority consensus in the network. 

dApps as an alternative ensure protection of user data and with the adoption of web 3.0 worldwide, the scalability of dApps is sure to expand further. According to emergen research, in 2019, the dApp market capitalization was valued at $10.52 billion and is anticipated to reach $368.25 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 56.1 per cent.  

But to scale at this size of the growth, it has to overcome the roadblocks of adoption. The foremost being, the underlying technology, which is too complex to understand for the mainstream users.  

A major shortcoming for developers in attracting users is the limited number of people familiar with the technology and can interact with it. The various concepts of the blockchain world requires a deeper technical knowledge of how the underlying technology functions. Facilitating user adoption by way of improving user experience and user interfaces has already begun in the decentralized applications sector and is expected to improve more in the near future.  

Bright minds are pouring into this space, despite the bearish market and are set on the path to remove the restrictions in the scalability of dapps. Tools providers are trying to make blockchain transactions simple, while infrastructure such as ImmutableX and Optimism are making Blockchain scale for the mainstream. 

A decentralized future for user data 

There is a monopoly on the data stored on current mobile applications with some of the world’s renowned companies. They have the ability to manipulate the information which surrounds a user’s social life, health, finances, and more.  But with the commencement of dApps, there is a chance for no central point of control to facilitate the flow or storage of data.  

Though dApps are facing numerous hindrances in their scalability, they indeed hold the potential to revolutionize the mobile applications sector. Currently, third parties own user data and do not share it across all applications. Thus, user data exists in silos. With dApps, the user owns their own data. Thus, you can connect to any dApp and all your previous data and behaviour across all decentralized applications is automatically pulled by the dApp. But they can just use this data to personalize your experience but they do now own this data or store it anywhere with them. It’s a new paradigm of possibility. 

Hence, the possibility of a decentralized future is near. Blockchain technology has already created a niche for itself in the technology sector and it is only a matter of time when they will witness mass user adoption around the globe. 

The article is authored by Aniket Jindal, Co-founder, Biconomy