A couple of days ago, I came across a post where someone said something that left me stunned for a long time:
I'm not a big deal, what privacy do I need to protect?
This sounds familiar. Five years ago, I thought the same way.
At that time, I had a dozen apps on my phone, each one asking for permissions. Contacts, location, albums, microphone—I blindly clicked 'allow' on all of them. I thought, I'm just an ordinary person, who would care to look at my information? There’s just that little bit of money in the bank, and those photos of eating, drinking, and having fun in my social circle, what could go wrong?
Until one day, a friend who works in risk control told me a true story.
There was a girl who saved 200,000 after three years of work, preparing to pay the down payment for a house. A week before signing the contract, she received a call from someone who said her social security account had an anomaly and asked her to cooperate with 'official customer service' for verification. The caller knew her ID number, where she had recently paid her social security, and that she was looking at houses—every piece of information was accurate. She believed it. 200,000 was transferred out in five installments and never came back.
The police later told her that the information was filled out during a 'scan to get a coupon' event a few months ago. At that time, she thought 'it’s just a phone number, it doesn’t matter.'
This girl is not a big deal. But her life was completely rewritten by the thought that 'there's nothing to hide'.
Did you know? In recent months, stories like this have been increasing in the news.
At the end of last year, the tech media (WIRED) was hacked, and the emails, phone numbers, and addresses of 2.3 million subscribers were put up for sale on the dark web. In March of this year, a financial company called Marquis was attacked by ransomware, and the social security numbers and bank account information of 670,000 people were stolen. Also, the (Washington Post) had information on over 9,700 employees stolen by hackers.
Among these victims, there are journalists, programmers, bank employees, and ordinary readers. They did nothing wrong, they simply handed over their information to a platform that 'should be reliable' at some moment.
And hackers only need one vulnerability.
This is the truth of the internet today: your data has never been 'yours'.
It stays in the servers of various platforms, like a ticking time bomb. The platform's security is the safety lock, but the safety lock can break at any time. Once it breaks, your information is like an unattended warehouse, anyone can go in and rummage around.
Some people say, then I just won't go online?
Don’t joke around. In today’s world, you can’t even go out without the internet—scanning a health code, ordering takeout, opening a bank account, which one doesn’t require you to leave information? We have been forced to 'submit' ourselves to the internet, the only difference is who we submitted to.
So what to do?
I've been following a project called @MidnightNetwork recently, and the founder Charles Hoskinson said something that really struck me. He said that existing blockchains are either completely transparent or completely anonymous, but the needs of the real world have never been either-or.
What we need is—privacy is the default, disclosure is optional.
Translated into plain language: you live in your own house, and the door is locked. If someone wants to see, you have to open the door yourself and decide which room they can see. It’s not like the front door is always wide open for anyone passing by to take a look.
What Midnight wants to do is build you a house like this.
Technically called 'zero-knowledge proof', it sounds impressive, but simply put, it means: you can prove 'I know this thing' without having to tell others what that thing is.
Your bank balance, your medical records, your chat contents—these should be your secrets. Midnight locks them up with cryptography, and only you have the key. When you want to show it to others, you decide how much and for how long.
Sounds like science fiction? Actually, no.
By the end of 2025, on the first day Midnight launched, its market value surged to $1 billion, with a trading volume of $1.8 billion. Over 1.5 million people received its tokens, and there was no venture capital involvement—the tokens were directly issued to users.
Why do so many people trust it? Probably because everyone is really fed up.
I'm fed up with searching for something on e-commerce platforms, and the next second all apps are pushing ads at you. I'm tired of registering a new account and receiving harassment calls the next day. I'm tired of not knowing where my photos, chat records, and bank statements are now stored.
No one wants to live in a monitored world.
When you stare at the screen, there might be someone behind the screen staring at you too.
So back to the initial question: what is there to protect about my privacy?
The answer is: protecting privacy is not about 'hiding something', but about 'owning something'—having control over one's own life.
I should decide where to put my secrets, who gets to see them, and how much to share—that should be my call, not the platform's, and certainly not the hackers'.
This is the digital age, the most basic dignity of a person.