According to the former senior executive of JPMorgan Chase, Amber
According to the former senior executive of JPMorgan Chase, Amber Baldet data may become money with the emergence and prevalence of cryptographic assets. She also thinks that this decade will be remembered for the surveillance capitalism.
Formerly the blockchain program lead at JPMorgan Chase, Amber Baldet let the biggest bank of America to found a blockchain startup, Clovyr. Baldet led the team built Quorum; an Ethereum adapted blockchain for businesses. She is also the alum of Fortune 40 Under 40 list. Recently Amber was appointed to the board of Zcash Foundation. Zcash Foundation is a non-profit group which governs the privacy-centric cryptocurrency Zcash.
Blockchain enthusiast Amber Baldet believes that people’s sentiments and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may transfer the concept of how data and money are exchanged, managed, and protected. The main aim of GDPR is to simplify the regulatory environment for international businesses and to give control to individuals over their personal data. According to Amber, globalisation is increasing at a rapid pace because of the advancement and development in the communication technology. Many companies have made a considerable profit by using personal information of individuals. Regulators have caught up and attempted to address the potentially exploitative practices of giant firms such as Facebook. According to Amber, “Blockchain technology makes it possible to think of our data as a scarce digital asset that can be owned, rented, and sold in new ways”.
Amber explains that currently, we are in a phase where such kinds of markets are emerging in which individuals can store what may be technically considered as data in personal digital vaults or cryptocurrency wallets.
Former application developer and business analyst at Avalon Research states that “as our money becomes data, our data is becoming money”. As user data is becoming more valuable than ever before, the line between data and money is dissolving. It is time to demand a better personal data security system from the governments. Now it’s time to protect user data so that the companies lose the access to personal data of individuals.
You can find several occasions when valuable user data has been stolen such as:
In August, 130 million customer data of Chinese hotel management firm, Huazhu Hotel Group were leaked. The malicious hacker had even tried to sell it for Bitcoins via a dark web. In late August large amount of data was also leaked from a Brazilian crypto arbitrage platform. Though in this case funds were not stolen the information of 264,000 users was shared publicly including their email addresses, phone numbers, and crypto account balances.
Amber believes that the European Union’s GDPR will provide a better and more accountable system for organisations who manage user data. There may be many ongoing efforts to protect user data and privacy, sometimes online systems which are designed to store user data compromise with the system while sometimes organisation which are managing the data become the victim of malicious hackers.