Many individuals in the blockchain industry have pointed fingers at tech giants like Facebook, predicting their fall precipitated by new contenders that would respect their users’ privacy and grow from a more sustainable business model that is not based on commoditizing their users’ data. Individual data ownership is often a key part of this narrative, relating to the economic and digital empowerment of consumers.

Although we strongly believe in privacy as a human right and agree the current model is flawed, we’d like to nuance this narrative with a deeper conversation about the significant technical and social obstacles we as an industry have to climb over to get us closer to the reality such narratives depict.

This event will host several speakers who will each give lightning talks about a key problem they have encountered while trying to embed individual data ownership in their projects. Each speakers will effectively add their point to the case against individual data ownership.

We will then round off the event with a panel composed of these speakers that will be open to the public, where the audience will be able to debate these points and share their own problems with the community to hopefully find someone who has overcome them already.

This promises to be an exciting event where we’ll discuss some of the most annoying problems BUIDLers of all sorts are facing today trying to make individual data ownership work.

Drinks and snacks will be provided!

Speakers:

Shreyas Thiagaraj, "Sustainable Business Models in Social Networks"

Shreyas is a Blockstack Engineering Partner, working on developer tools and mobile efforts. He comes from a background in product development for various social apps, and before that built developer tools for mobile apps as an engineer at Microsoft.

Arjun Hassard, "Performing Arbitrary Operations on Encrypted Data"

Arjun Hassard is NuCypher's product and partnerships lead. He was previously Head of Product for both Factmata and SyndicateRoom, holds a Master’s from Kyoto University, and a physics degree from Imperial College London.

Ben Livshits, "Machine Learning with Small Data"

Dr. Ben Livshits is the Chief Scientist for Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks intrusive ads and trackers. He is also an Associate Professor at Imperial College London and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Previously, he was a research scientist at Microsoft Research. He received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006. Ben’s research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis techniques to finding errors in programs. Ben has published papers at PLDI, POPL, Oakland Security, Usenix Security, CCS, SOSP, ICSE, FSE, and many other venues. He is the author of over 100 academic papers, dozens of patents, and multiple tech transfer awards for bringing research into practice.

This event is part of Blockstack's Decentralizing The World Tour and co-organized by Cambrial Capital and Blockstack community members Louise Ivan and Blended.io.