As more elements of our lives move online, the amount and value of data we accumulate are rapidly increasing—our communications through email, instant messaging tools, and social media applications, our identity information, etc. - all this data is now online and moves seamlessly between our devices.
However, to achieve this, all data must be stored somewhere, on some computer; if it’s not your computer, then it’s someone else's, which means that the 'someone else' controlling that computer ultimately controls your data, and they also decide how you can use your data, and you may even lose access.
But there's more: others who control everything also decide who can access this data; your data has long been used to serve ads to you, enticing you to buy more things you don’t need. If you've read any updates to the end-user license agreements you may have signed in the past year, you’ll find that many companies now claim the right to use your data to train their artificial intelligence.
What are the alternatives?
Running your own service is actually quite difficult; operating your own infrastructure requires a significant investment of time.
The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) revolutionizes the way services are built; it allows you to store code and data without relinquishing control, so you remain in charge, and it does not require you to operate the infrastructure yourself.
Fundamentally, you can think of ICP as a computing platform built around the concept of ownership of code and data: a sovereign cloud, a true world computer.
This is achieved through the construction of a decentralized network; the underlying principles of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) are the same as Bitcoin, yet after years of research and development by many, the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) has managed to extend the use of decentralized technology beyond just a simple token ledger for monetary transactions.
Today, its use has expanded to a fully functional computing platform that can host all your code and data, giving you control over everything.
With ICP, data sovereignty is in your hands.
Join us on the journey of the world computer.
Learn more:
Discover the Internet Computer at internetcomputer.org;
Watch tutorials on the DFINITY YouTube channel;
For developers, start building now at icp.ninja;
This article is adapted from 'World Computer Technology Lecture' by Björn Tackmann, Research Director at the DFINITY Foundation; you can watch the original video.
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