The American media revealed on the night of 17 local time that the British "Cambridge Analysis" company, which was deeply involved in the scandal of abusing personal privacy data, originally planned to launch a personal privacy data storage service and sell it in the form of cryptocurrency through blockchain technology. The concepts of personal information encryption and monetization are not new. The key to this idea lies in everyone's autonomy in personal information. Some insiders believe that blockchain technology may bring about a "revolution" in personal data protection.
In the era of big data, personal data is considered as precious as gold. The disclosure of personal data is worrying, but most people can't cut off their connection with the Internet for fear that data will be collected. At this stage, enterprises, schools, hotels and social networking sites responsible for keeping personal information are often not responsible enough. Experts believe that blockchain technology, as a "middleware" with the characteristics of encryption, credibility, peer-to-peer and not easy to tamper with, is expected to solve this problem.
The emergence of blockchain technology has transferred the control of personal data from internet companies to users themselves, so that everyone can control their personal data. Through it, users' personal data can be associated with personal digital ID cards, users can choose whether digital ID cards are anonymous, pseudonyms or public, and they can also access the blockchain application platform from any device anytime and anywhere to control their personal data on the Internet.
For example, the information of someone's ID number on the blockchain may be converted into a string of ciphertext, and the facial image information is also encrypted. When he checks in at the hotel, he only needs to send the encrypted ID number to the hotel through the application. The hotel compares the information with the encrypted data on the blockchain application, and does not need to know any real information about him, but as long as the comparison results of the encrypted data are consistent, the check-in can be guaranteed.
At the same time, the development of big data and artificial intelligence requires a lot of user data resources, and users can selectively sell personal data as encrypted currency and get a certain return. For example, if e-commerce needs user data to develop a new application, users can choose to sell their shopping history data, but their address and account number can still be kept secret.
In the field of gene sequencing, blockchain applications have begun to challenge the "way to make money" for traditional gene sequencing companies to sell personal data.
In recent years, gene sequencing services for ordinary people have been highly sought after. Take the American "23 and Me" Chromosome Biotechnology Company as an example. Consumers can get family genetic information with a few mouthfuls of saliva for less than 100 dollars. If they pay another $80, they can get an in-depth analysis of genetic health risks based on the original data. However, this company is not satisfied with the revenue of sequencing service, and it also sells millions of customer genetic data to pharmaceutical companies by sorting and packaging. The Parkinson's disease data sold at the beginning of 20 15 alone is as high as 60 million dollars. Many similar biotechnology companies, while obtaining service income from consumers, make "double money" by reselling consumer data.
In February this year, George Mcdonaldchurch, a geneticist at Harvard University, founded the "Nebula Gene" company, hoping to break this model through blockchain technology. The company plans to complete the whole genome sequencing at a price below $65,438+$0,000, and the cost will be borne by customers. In return, customers will have the autonomy of sequencing data and intuitively understand the disease risk corresponding to their genetic information. Genetic information will be protected by blockchain technology, encrypted and monetized at the same time, and stored and sold according to customers' wishes.
The company plans to launch a "lucky coin" as a trading medium. Customers can exchange their genetic information for "nebula coins" or pay for their own sequencing with "nebula coins". Pharmaceutical companies can buy "nebula coins" with traditional currency to obtain genetic information data of ordinary people. The whole transaction process is completed through the blockchain platform, which is transparent and safe.
Church said that after integrating many factors such as sequencing cost, genetic information protection, data management and genome big data processing, blockchain technology allows more people to truly "own" their own genetic information.