Decentralization

The right to be forgotten

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What do corporations know about us?

Corporations, large Internet sites, electronic services, applications on your smartphone, and God knows who else... Everyone collects and analyzes your data: geolocation, behavioral responses, and personal correspondence.

There are several data types about a person, and not all of them are created by him. Here is a far from a complete list of data that are of great interest and are in high demand:

  • Automatically generated location data This is information about the location of a cell phone or device from which you go online or keep it in your pocket.

  • Service Data This is information that a site or service needs to provide you with a service—typically your first name, last name, phone number, shipping address, and credit card information.

  • Voluntary public-controlled data This is the type of information you leave on the Web voluntarily, consciously, and proactively and want to be available to the public. At the same time, as a data producer, you have complete control over their availability.

  • Voluntary public but uncontrolled data There are specific platforms where your comments on other people's posts are out of your control, and you can't delete or edit them.

  • Biometric data The market for wearable devices is growing (fitness bracelets that measure heart rate, fingerprint and voice control sensors, etc.). This is because our body has several activity indicators and unique identifiers.

  • Attributed data There is information about you on the Internet that others possess, and you may not even know about it. For example, if your friend wrote a post about you and did not tell you, there is a piece of information about you that you have nothing to do with.

  • Behavioral Data The information about your activity on the website is collected, analyzed, and converted into a portrait of your preferences and hobbies.

  • Medical Data Medical level readings of heart rate monitors, blood glucose meters, body thermometers, smart inhalers for asthmatics that analyze the composition of residual air in the lungs, data on visits to doctors, medical history, test results, prescribed medications, whether you have allergies, phobias, and mental deviations - all this information in most developed countries has long been computerized and stored exclusively in digital form.

  • Collateral data The essence of this data perfectly captures the ancient folk wisdom, "Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are." For example, if you have 70% of your followers on Facebook that is gay, then it's highly likely that you are too. If 80% of your searches are related to musical instruments, studios and music, you are probably a musician. The conclusions that can be drawn from complex data are astounding. For example, Facebook can predict with a high degree of certainty which candidate a user in their country will vote for. And your cellular operator, if desired, can find out if you are cheating on your wife/husband because it knows who, when, and where you are calling and with which contact persons you intersect in space (if they use the services of the same operator).

  • Secretly collected data We will not dwell too much on the data collected by the special services and their methods. Edward Snowden told everyone about this in detail. However, remember that intelligence agencies and highly skilled hackers always have the theoretical ability to remotely connect to your computer and turn on your camera or microphone without your knowledge, record everything you type, or secretly take a screenshot of a working window.

Heroes of viral memes

In addition, there is a tremendous amount of information about you posted by other users on the network: photos from parties, funny short videos, screenshots of private correspondence, and much more. The scandalous pictures and videos of famous people pop up here and there like mushrooms after the rain is above mentioning.

We are talking about people who find themselves in a funny or ridiculous situation and burn with shame. There are quite a few cases of bullying individuals for this or information that got into the network. Some of them were in danger and forced to change residence. The story of Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, who burst into a pizzeria armed with an automatic rifle after reading materials related to Pizzagate, is indicative.

They say that "the Internet remembers everything." Since then, laws have been passed that sometimes allow information to be removed from the public domain. Yet another aspect arises.

The right to be forgotten vs. freedom of speech

The right to be forgotten is closely linked to the right to freedom of speech, press, and information. At the same time, several experts believe that the right to be forgotten is a severe legal regression since it accompanies the emergence of problems of censorship and manipulation of information, infringing on freedom of speech and the right to free access to information - fundamental human rights enshrined at the national (including at the level constitutions) and the international legal level (art. 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

On the other hand, the right to be forgotten accompanies the right to inviolability of private and personal life since the result is the removal of information for socially valuable purposes from the general information field, to which an indefinite circle of persons has access, based on the principle of treating information as a thing, owned by a person on the right of ownership with all the ensuing consequences. Thus, the right to be forgotten becomes a bridge between freedom of information and privacy. In contrast, the right to disseminate/publicize information becomes the antipode of the right to be forgotten.

How is the right to be forgotten implemented today?

At the moment, a person who wants to remove information about himself from public access can legally apply to the Internet site with a request to remove materials related to him. You can go to court if the Internet resource refuses to comply with this requirement. In reality, however, it’s not as simple as most sites, and court rulings ignore these requirements.

However, Google has a dedicated support section detailing the possibilities for exercising the right to be forgotten due to the high volume of hits. https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en

Our favorite blockchain

Now let's move on to the critical question. Blockchain. If "the Internet remembers everything," but there are specific levers for removing information from the public domain, what about the blockchain?

Everything can be written into the blockchain. Removing this information from the blockchain network will no longer be possible. It will stay there FOREVER! Anyone can access this information.

If we are talking about funny videos, we can Laugh and forget about it. But there are things more severe and tragic. So how to deal with it?

Summary

We'd like to see how the state budget moves to the blockchain: transparent transactions, controlled costs, and no closed areas. Blockchain is also instrumental in general voting. However, if an open public poll on the blockchain regarding setting wages for civil servants from the budget, it would be a combo! )))

But what to do with personal information that you would like to get rid of? We are all human, and we tend to make mistakes. Sometimes these errors become the subject of public attention. Living with the constant thought that an unsightly piece of your life can forever remain a record in the blockchain is not the best idea. By the way, the guys from the Black Mirror series foresaw this dilemma. Something similar describes the event from the series "All About You."

What to do with the new technological opportunities that come into our lives? How do we adapt to the new social conditions these technologies give rise to?

The question is earnest. I invite you to a public discussion. Please write in the comments what you think about it!

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Join our community, to build a future where communication is decentralized. May the code be with you!

Data Centers & Ecology

Data Centers & Ecology

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The 66th episode of Citizen Cosmos was dedicated to the CUDOS project - the decentralized cloud computing network. Among the topics discussed with Matt Hawkins, the CEO of CUDOS, were crypto, mining, diversity of cloud computing projects, gaming, education, and many more. However, above all these topics stands the primary goal of CUDOS is sustainability and eco-friendliness. Therefore, we will discuss the data centers, their harmful impact on the ecology, and the ways of dealing with them.

Data centers, facilities that centralize an organization's shared IT operations and equipment to store, process, and disseminate data and applications, consume 3-7% of the world's electricity. In addition, data centers require 24/7 to keep their equipment running. As a result, the operation of the data center provokes greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 emissions are also results of data centers usage of computing power making it one of the most disturbing factors. Moreover, this does not even consider the impact of construction of the data center, which is also the sourse of various harmful emissions. To learn more about the carbon footprint the data centers and cloud computing leave, we recommend reading Hessam Lavi's article from Climatiq.

PUE

As the problem of data centers’ harmful emissions is becoming more and more disturbing, many big and smaller companies are considering the PUE. PUE or Power Utilization Efficiency is a metric for evaluating the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE reflects the electrical energy consumed by the data center to the point consumed directly by the data center equipment. For example, if the data center receives 10 MW of power from the network and all equipment keeps at 5 MW, the PUE indicator will be 2. If the reading gap decreases, the coefficient will be 1, which is perfect. The PUE is globally used to understand which regions are affected mainly by the data centers' emissions. However, although the indicator may help some areas to start working on problem-solving, it might sometimes be unjust. For example, some data centers simply have worse climatic conditions than others. So, to cool a conditional data center in South Africa, you need much more electricity than a data center in Iceland. The most energy inefficient data centers are in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Europe and the area uniting the USA and Canada are among the leaders in terms of PUE. So how can the PUE be lowered, especially for the regions with a hot climate?

Free cooling

One of the ways to lower the PUE is free cooling. A significant percentage of energy consumed by data centers goes to operating artificial cooling systems. The implementation of free cooling is one of the ways to reduce the cost of this energy. The outside air is filtered, heated, cooled, and supplied into the server room. Exhaust hot air is thrown out or partially mixed with the incoming flow. The more outdoor air temperature is suitable for the data center hall, the less energy is needed to bring it to the desired condition.

Proper use of the capacity available in the data center can also contribute to energy efficiency. For example, the purchased servers should either work for the clients' tasks or consume minimal energy during downtime. One way to control the situation is to use infrastructure management software. For example, a data center infrastructure management system. This software automatically redistributes the server load, disables idle devices, and recommends the cooling fans' rotation speed. In addition, timely updating of equipment is an integral part of improving the data center's energy efficiency. For example, an outdated server is often inferior in performance and resource intensity to a new generation server. Therefore, to reduce PUE, it is recommended to update the equipment as often as possible.

Finally, the optimal way to lower PUE is to use virtual servers. They consume 80% less energy. It happens because putting more virtual servers on fewer physical machines incurs hardware maintenance, cooling, and power costs. In addition, virtualization allows reallocating virtual resources from processors to storage. Therefore, electricity is only used to ensure operation, and alternative energy sources improve energy efficiency.

Particular actions

Talking about CUDOS and their dedication to sustainability and reduction of carbon footprint, it is important to talk about their particular actions. Cudos offers scalable computing solutions that address two apparent possibilities. Firstly, the Cudos network is an l1 blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem. It uses a consensus system with delegated share confirmation (DPoS). At its core, PoS is also more careful about the environment. Therefore, it does not require energy for crypto mining, like the Proof of Work protocol. By communicating with other networks and providing data and computing oracles, the Cudos network can also effectively act as an l2 solution for other blockchains and solve scalability and throughput problems. Secondly, Cudo Ventures is working on creating a platform for automating the process of managing and trading unused computing power. Finally, it improves existing cloud service offerings regarding supply and demand for computing power. Thus, the Cudo solution will provide sustainability, economic rewards, and improved and personalized services. Ultimately, Cudo aims to connect them by giving them the first ever new Level 3. Furthermore, it will allow blockchain networks to seamlessly perform any computing work, integrating cloud and blockchain solutions into one.

Today, data centers are one of the most worrying sources of ecological problems. However, more and more companies are striving to make the data-keeping process as eco-friendly as possible regarding the PUE index. As we see even smaller companies like CUDOS getting involved in sustainability awareness, we can be sure that sooner or later, most data centers will be energy efficient.


If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:

Join our community, to build a future where communication is decentralized. May the code be with you!