Blockchain could solve problems

Since its emergence, the internet has been teaching us important things about trust. From Nigerian princes to those requesting our A/S/L (age/sex/location) on AOL chat rooms, we’ve learned that not everyone has the best intentions for the information we choose to divulge.

However, we have not been so discerning with corporations, who are now using our information to turn a profit. This is the subject of an ongoing antitrust saga in which the federal government is taking Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to task on various questionable business ethics practices.

Amazon has used their crowdsourced product ratings to identify popular items, manufacture their own versions, and promote them in searches. Apple’s App Store is a gatekeeper for the mobile apps we consume on iOS devices (though steadily decreasing due to competition, their market share as of last June was 47%), authorizing and promoting some over others. Facebook is maintaining market dominance through acquiring its competitors, a long list notably including WhatsApp and Instagram.

Google’s vulnerability to questioning spans many of its offerings; however, search is at its heart -- about half of all searches begin and end on Google’s site.

It is unclear whether these investigations will end up like the IBM antitrust suit, which dragged on during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s before being withdrawn, as new technologies swoop in to better safeguard our data.

In his 2018 film “Trust Machine,” documentarian Alex Winter explores the potential of blockchain. To oversimplify, blockchain is an electronic ledger that lives on a vast network of servers and records transactions in a way that is secure, synchronized and difficult to hack. The transactions may be monetary -- think cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin -- or not -- companies around the world are developing blockchain solutions for healthcare, real estate, education,and many other industries with big problems to solve.

A quick use case: If your health records were on the blockchain, you would hold an encrypted key for your file that would include any and all data related to your health history. This solves a myriad of industry problems: It cuts down on paperwork, streamlines your record across providers, exposes fraud, and eliminates vulnerability to digital security breaches at insurance companies, to name a few. It means that you would have ownership of and control over your records -- clinical reports, lab tests, imaging, the whole shebang.

Because blockchain offers a future that cuts out the middleman, we may soon be able to exchange assets and information directly with one another without the need for a company to manage it for us.

Decentralization, though, comes at a cost. Setting aside current energy inefficiencies of the system -- which are significant -- there is the issue of human error to consider.

Since no central body is accountable for quality control of blockchain inputs, it will be important for any solutions that take hold to establish best practices and motivate users to adhere to them. Anyone who has ever worked with a database knows that inconsistent or incomplete data renders the system ugly, useless or some combination of the two. Due to the decentralized nature of blockchain, these standards will be best determined by a community of users.

Are we capable of this? We’ll see. But, in a world where our information is contributing to escalating issues of wealth distribution, putting our trust in one another may be our only hope for reclaiming equity.

Aleshia Howell is a Savannah-based technology entrepreneur.

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