CoinDesk Live: Understanding Our Digital Personas Feat. Alex McDougall

Our digital personas are becoming the primary way we interact with the world, particularly during this worldwide pandemic. But we only see a tiny bit of the information being captured while we’re online, and we rarely know what our personal data is being used for. While the majority of our economy is related to our personal data, there’s no interface to help us understand what we actually look like to data collectors and their customers.

Welcome to a reboot of CoinDesk Live: Lockdown Edition, a livestream series in which CoinDesk journalists and virtual audience members chat with speakers from Consensus: Distributed, our first virtual conference May 11-15.

In this kickoff episode, CoinDesk journalist Bailey Reutzel speaks with Alex McDougall of Bicameral Ventures about the data trails we leave behind when we surf the internet, and how users can take back some control of that data.

https://twitter.com/CoinDesk/status/1250888281576914951

Bailey and Alex discuss:

• Free apps like House Party that collect our information
• Project MetaMe, Alex’s single sign-on mechanism that brings back all the data on other platforms, allowing people to manage and even sell it themselves
• Contract tracing, a necessary evil, or just evil?
• Is the Apple-Google solution the worst of all worlds, with an option to opt out as well as trusting mediocre data stewards?
• As health data is clearly valuable to Google, many people simply don’t trust Google with their health data
• Pros and cons of these privacy tools such as DuckDuckGo, Brave Browser, Ghostery, Lockdown, and Loginhood
• The book “Surveillance Capitalism”
• Dystopian Fiction
• The book “Snow Crash”
• zkSNARKS for data
• How self-soverign meta-versions of ourselves might help protect us from “lizard brain” manipulation, by providing cleaner thinking versions of ourselves
• The book Alex is working on, “The Lizard and the Machine: Maintaining Human Integrity at a Machine-Speed World”

Alex McDougall on Twitter: @AlexM_Bicameral

Bailey Reutzel on Twitter: @BLR13

Next up

Sign up to join the next CoinDesk Live on Tuesday, April 21, with Priyanka Desai and Aaron Wright from The Lao as we discuss for-profit DAOs.

Then join us at Consensus: Distributed May 11-15.