Page 466 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2024

2024 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

independent of them. Whilst this controls the content being
seen rather than the private data of users wishing to see it, it
is indicative of the profound impact on freedom of speech
caused by the centralization of data and data access points. It
also raises concerns for users worried that attempts to access
this information are being monitored and logged.

3.4 Peer-surveillance and self-censorship

We have witnessed an exponential increase in deep fake
development, AI developed revenge porn, and cyberstalking,
and whilst the impacts can potentially be felt by everyone the
greatest impact has been on women and minorities with
studies showing more than 70% of cyber-stalking victims are
women [38]. We see similar kinds of digital intimidation
being used in attempts to silence environmental defenders,
human rights organizations, and journalists [39]. These away by the dream. However, the dream can only be realized
when the reality of collaboration, co-ordination, and
tactics have led to fears within human rights defense groups
that policy and legal governance alone are not enough to governance is accepted, and the risk of poor strategic
conceptualization has been accounted for.
protect the human rights of those who challenge commercial
and political strategies. For the right to freedom of thought From an economics standpoint, monopolies are shown to
and political dissent without fear of retribution we must increase wealth gaps and poverty, whereas increased market
provide privacy solutions that support opportunities for competition increases innovation and the redistribution of
discourse. With fear of retaliation and cancel culture there is wealth with associated positive societal shifts. Through its
also an understandable psychological imperative for citizens distributed ledger technology (DLT) across a node network
to censor themselves. There is a desire to avoid balanced and ecosystem, blockchain is the foremost enabler of W3.0
rational political, religious, or ideological commentary in an decentralization, which provides opportunities to redistribute
environment of algorithms that encourages extreme opinion control from centralized agents. Underpinned by consensus
due to its virality and potential monetization of human algorithms, cryptographic hashing, and mostly open
attention. This has extensive implications on societies ability development protocols it offers transparent, immutable, and
to meet human rights on a global scale. One driver behind verifiable information across its network. The decentralizing
self-censorship is a perceived lack of adequate legal character of blockchain reduces barriers to enter markets and
protections. A separate debate, beyond the remit of this paper, scale at a competitive pace, thereby offering opportunities to
must discuss the balance between privacy, censorship, and redistribute influence into online communities that can
the greater good of society. For this paper however, we argue develop across physical and economic landscapes. This has
that embedded privacy would give greater voice to the the potential to reduce the centralized entity benefits behind
moderates and minorities who currently avoid debate for fear surveillance capitalism business models. However, although
of online or physical retaliation. the transparency and transaction traceability of the DLT
model allows the decentralized node network to exist, there
4. THE PRIVATE SPACE CREATED BY WEB 3.0 needs to be adequate protections to reduce opportunities for
tracing pseudo-anonymous addresses against other data
Partly in response to the open and decentralized W1.0 sources that allow for data aggregation and identity profiling.
becoming an oligopoly of holding companies and tech giants Other issues include the concept of data immortality, caused
that is now W2.0, and partly because the phoenix that was by data addition to the blockchain being near impossible to
Berners-Lee’s original vision was arguably always going to change or delete, meaning if data is exposed it is arguably
emerge from the ashes, we now have the advent of W3.0. exposed forever; scalability and energy consumption issues
Differences in how we consume information across the three with privacy concepts such as zero-knowledge proofs which
iterations of the Web ecosystem can be seen in Figure 1. slow down the network; and the current lack of fluid
Hailed as the decentralized ecosystem that will allow users interoperability which is required for an effective SSI
to regain controls over their privacy, and for innovation and solution to be developed. However, by addressing these
competition to return to the markets [40], W3.0 has challenges in future development, the decentralized nature of
enormous potential. Only however, if we design it to be this design, supported by SSI, allows the strongest response
resistant to the sociological and economic models that to the W2.0 surveillance problems, by reducing opportunities
created the W2.0 problems. Through blockchain technology for centralized agents to aggregate personal data.
and decentralization there is hope for more inclusivity,
equitability, interconnected collaboration, and security in the 4.1 Self-sovereign identity (SSI)
digital world [41]. Shifting from centralized server
architectures controlled by entities driven by short-term Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is the concept of removing
financial goals, into distributed networks with peer-to-peer intermediaries from the identity management chain through
protocols and user-centric models, we could become carried decentralization, thereby removing centralized repository

– 422 –