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Are your users worried about how their private data is handled in your apps? The answer is very likely YES.
The success of an app these days is increasingly closely tied to how much users trust the app with their data. With fears that their data is being sold or misused by companies rising, all it takes is one breach or the hint of a bad actor to ruin a brand’s reputation for good.
It’s little wonder, then, that responsible developers are investing in privacy, data governance, and transparency in an effort to win and retain users that fear unauthorized access to their data. Making user data privacy a key concern helps you do better than others while relieving your users of their data privacy concerns.
Today users expect more from the developers who build the services they use. This shift in expectations places a new ethical burden on developers to not only comply with minimum regulations but also to ensure transparency and control for users at every stage of data collection and especially usage
Ask someone who is scared of flying on an airplane what makes it so terrifying and they’ll likely tell you it’s the lack of control. Driving fast in a car? No problem, but in an airplane they’ve surrendered the steering wheel to a pilot. In the same way, a user of your application is handing over control of their data to you.
Say you’ve built a “free” weather app that tracks that user in real time. The location data helps make the weather forecast more accurate, but how can you ethically control that data, and are you building in options for users to opt-out?
These days users might understand that every “free” app comes at the cost of losing control of some personal data but by adopting tools and secure protocols that put privacy first, developers can prioritize user control without sacrificing functionality.
So, what worries your users most when it comes to their data? Here are the ‘big three’ data privacy concerns that keep your users up at night or – even worse for the success of your application – keep them from being a user at all.
One Pew Research Center study showed that 79% of Americans were somewhat or very concerned about the collection of their private data and how that data is used.
These fears are well founded as there remain many developers whose third-party partners regularly sell entire datasets without ever informing users. Add to this worries about the enormous amount of data that users already choose to share publicly and it’s clear that data privacy is top of mind.
Builders can’t do much to protect publicly shared data such as social media posts or profile pictures, they can alleviate concerns about collection by safeguarding sensitive data such as private bookmarks, personal lists, and user settings.
By making ethical choices and prioritizing transparency and clear data management choices, developers can protect the data that users value. In the face of the spread of AI technologies that will scrape, leverage, and monetize any data that is ineffectively secured, protecting sensitive and private data is a must.
Sometimes it's easy for users to understand how their data is used by an application. A suggestion based on a prior purchase by Amazon or a recommendation for a new movie by Netflix - these things make sense.
But many times users don’t make that connection and where there is confusion, a feeling of vulnerability inevitably follows. Poor data privacy management by developers can have significant impacts. Users risk identity theft and financial damages, and builders risk a loss of trust, fines and penalties, and enormous reputational risk.
Data breaches at companies like 23andMe, or from government databases like that of the Shanghai Police have seen the data of millions of people leaked and on-sold to bad actors. In each case, better privacy practices in general and the adoption of decentralized technologies in particular could have prevented the harm to all stakeholders.
Even when users choose to share their data they still like to retain control over how it is used. Most will want to avoid their contact details being on-sold to a third party broker and many will want their personal details retained only if there is a good reason to do so.
Regulations like GDPR and CCPA go some of the way towards protecting users but loopholes like claiming a media license in Sweden or pseudonymisation of data remain.
Decentralized tools like the blockchain and smart contracts tools help developers go beyond these regulatory standards. They help builders put users back in control, empowering them to manage what data is shared, who has access to it, and how that data is used.
Reducing data privacy to passwords, regulations or user rights is shortsighted. Instead, it’s about some fundamental freedoms, perspectives and expectations that individuals maintain about their personal and private data.
Data privacy concerns only emerge when these freedoms, perspectives, and expectations are threatened or ignored. When users talk about data privacy, here’s what they are really mean:
At its core, data privacy is about freedom to choose. Users need to be given the freedom to choose to share or not share their data with an app or a company. They also need to be given choices about what data to share, for how long, with what third-parties and under what circumstances.
The freedom to choose here isn’t a one-time mouse click but a fully informed, fully engaged, and entirely proactive choice by the user as to who gets to access their private data and why.
To app vendors, data might be considered anything from a byproduct to a goal. To users with data privacy concerns, however, their data is an asset, and it’s one they want to protect. Developers should consider user data the same way that their users do.
Instead of seeing user data as something to leverage, exploit, or sell, they should treat it as something to protect. When personal and private data is protected like the asset it truly is, user satisfaction rises, and app engagement only improves.
For users, data privacy means users set the rules about how their data is managed and shared, including by third-party applications. The control of the data rests with the user, not the app maker, and it is the user who decides when, where, and how their data is leveraged and for what reasons.
Empowering users with the governance of their own private and personal data helps to alleviate their data privacy concerns and keeps them aware of how their data is used, stored and shared.
The tools already exist to give users the control they are seeking over their own data and mitigate their data privacy concerns.
Some like end-to-end encryption are already widely adopted in a variety of domains while others are only now becoming well known.
Others like smart contracts allow users to manage their own data permissions and keep their data confidential while decentralized applications (dApps) help users to set and revoke permissions. Embrace these and you’ll be perfectly positioned to provide the data privacy your users deserve.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to address user concerns about their data – the technology you need to provide your users with peace of mind and full control over their data already exists.
Remember passing notes in the classroom and hoping that no one opened your letter on its way across the room? Online there is no need for such worries as long as your data is transferred using end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
With E2EE it is impossible for anyone other than the intended recipient to decrypt the data. Data cannot be intercepted – or if it is it cannot be decrypted – and it cannot be modified in transit, either.
A smart contract on a blockchain can enable a user to manage their data permissions. Every time a firm or a third party wanted to access that personal or private data the smart contract would ensure that the user gives their express permission to do so. Without the exchange of the user’s specific cryptographic key, the smart contract means no data will be shared.
DeCC is the combination of Confidential Computing and blockchain technology, designed to secure data in use and provide full transparency. Confidential Computing goes beyond traditional methods that only encrypt data at rest or in transit; it protects data during processing using hardware-based encryption through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
When Confidential Computing is combined with blockchain, it creates a governance layer that verifies and enforces data processing rules, enabling the concept of DeCC. This empowers developers to build applications where users have true ownership and control over their data, ensuring privacy is maintained at every stage of the data lifecycle. The result is a comprehensive, decentralized solution for data protection in Web3.
Their data isn’t theirs, unless it is protected.
In a world where data breaches are common and identity theft is a daily threat, it’s little wonder that users hold significant data privacy concerns. Data is power, and finding the right tools to safeguard information will inspire trust from your users and help them rest a lot easier.
Decentralized technologies from iExec, not only help you to keep valuable data safe but also offer the control and privacy that users want. If you’re ready to level-up your dApp and deliver a secure, reliable, and private, the tools you need are just a click away.
