The next internet must give control back to users
The post The next internet must give control back to users appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial. For most of the internet’s history, we thought we were getting a harmless convenience economy: faster browsing, smarter recommendations, free services subsidised by opaque advertising. What we actually received was a silent shift in power — from users to platforms, from autonomy to extraction, from consent to surveillance disguised as convenience. Summary Convenience quietly became surveillance: Web2 platforms and AI systems shifted power from users to corporations by extracting, modeling, and internalizing our behavior, eroding privacy and agency without meaningful consent. Web3 repeated the mistake in reverse: In solving trust with radical transparency, blockchains exposed user behavior on public ledgers, turning self-sovereignty into a new form of permanent surveillance. The next internet must be privacy-by-default: True user control requires protocol-level encryption where data is hidden by default, transparency is optional, and individuals choose what to reveal—restoring agency without sacrificing functionality. The modern internet no longer merely hosts our interactions; it studies us. Every digital gesture, every purchase, scroll, location ping, message, pause, or late-night search feeds a behavioural model we did not meaningfully choose to participate in. Our personal data has become the raw material of a surveillance economy so pervasive that it now knows things about us we would never articulate aloud. These insights are not trivial. They map political preferences, infer sexual orientation, predict mental-health issues, anticipate relationship tension, and model our impulse triggers with uncanny precision. The largest platforms didn’t become powerful by building better software. They became powerful by building better profiles of us. And somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing it. The erosion of agency didn’t arrive with a dramatic announcement — it arrived through nudges, permissions, cookies, and defaults that…
