FRACTAL; A VIABLE TOOL TO CURB THE MENACE OF "FREE" INTERNET
Internet browsing has never been free. Every time you visit a website, an auction for your data takes place — location, demographics, age, gender, frequently visited sites, everything you do on the internet — in exchange for "free" usage of their products, like free emailing services and social media platforms. Thee companies utilize that information to improve your experience on those platforms, as well as to target you with ads, which pays the bills and more. This article tends to address the 3 most predominant challenges of the "free internet" and the role of Fractal in curbing (or possibly eradicating) them.
Let's assume there exists a web that pays you to use its services, rather than ones that require payment. A web in which you may enjoy and control the information you want to broadcast and receive. Fractal is a zero-margin open source protocol that provides an exceptional version of the free internet by establishing a basic standard for transferring user information in a fair and open manner.
It enables users to create and manage their own digital identities without having to rely on a single service provider. Fractal intends to solve the free internet’s three (3) most predominant problems, which includes; the fact that a larger percentage (about 60%) of the Market is controlled by a form of duopoly (Facebook and google), ⅓rd of Ad-Tech costs are unattributed, and about 28% Web traffic is generated by bots.
The sheer scale of social networks and Google is mind-boggling. Today, the Internet has over 4.4 billion users globally. With around 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook has roughly 72 percent of the market share of all social networks worldwide. It also owns Instagram, which has about 1.1 billion members, as well as WhatsApp and Messenger. Google, the world's most popular search engine, controls around 92 percent of all search engines and is utilized by over 4 billion people, as well as YouTube (both owned by Alphabet), has 2.3 billion subscribers. This unimaginable dominance and market control is why we refer to Google and Facebook as the Duopoly of internet.
The dilemma is that most customers are unaware of the scope of data collected on them, as well as how that data is utilized, where it goes, and whether it is safeguarded. This information is occasionally hijacked or used for reasons other than advertising. According to the Washington Post, Google's Chrome is essentially a monitoring tool for both Google and other outside data corporations. Giving out this information is considered inefficient in a sense that we tend to also unconsciously give out crucial, sensitive, personal details than necessary; like scanning our passports to show we are of legal age, in which case we also submit our date of birth, personal address and legal names, same as submitting utility bills and bank statements just to meet some certain eligibility criteria.
Furthermore, the majority of website visitors are bots—or computers designed to do automated tasks—rather than humans. They are the internet's worker bees as well as henchman. Some bots assist you in refreshing your Facebook feed or determining how to rank Google search results; others pose as people and launch deadly DDoS assaults. Publishers and marketers are grappling with how to combat the surge of bot traffic, commonly known as non-human traffic.
Bots that land on a website and click on various aspects of the page might create fraudulent ad clicks, which is referred to as click fraud. While this may appear to increase ad income at first, internet ad networks are quite effective at detecting bot clicks. They will take action if they think a website is engaging in click fraud, generally by banning the site and its owner from their network. As a result, website owners that host advertisements must be always vigilant against bot click fraud.
Inventory hoarding bots may target sites with little inventory. As the name implies, these bots visit e-commerce sites and load their shopping carts with items that are therefore unavailable for purchase by actual customers. This can also result in excessive inventory replenishment from a supplier or manufacturer. The inventory hoarding bots never buy anything; their sole purpose is to disrupt inventory availability.
To overcome these issues, Fractal utilizes two interrelated strategies:⦁ In Web3 (multichain DID), providing crucial infrastructure for identity management.⦁ Shifting businesses like AdTech from surveillance capitalism to transparency democracies, with better data markets based on sovereignty and permission.
This would allow our users to do things like:⦁ Keep control of their data;⦁ Selectively reveal verifiable information to selected third parties (for example, to get personalized adverts and promotions);⦁ For reasonable remuneration, they exchange their data with third parties (e.g. data aggregators, AdTech businesses).
To effectively contend with the AdTech businesses, considerable advancements in identity management are required to enable for the privacy-preserving matching of user attributes with advertising aims while respecting user liberty. For crucial metrics including performance monitoring, conversion tracking, attribution, and frequency capping, AdTech relies on end-user uniqueness.
Furthermore, bots, rather than human end users, already see more than 99 percent of internet adverts. Identity verification procedures are necessary to determine either uniqueness or human life.
By issuing validated credentials, Fractal ID provides for privacy-preserving compliance. When setting up their Fractal Wallet, users just have to upload their underlying personal information once. Fractal then verifies the information, encrypts it, and stores it safely. Whenever a user has to prove something about themselves, they may provide Fractal-issued credentials rather than the underlying data.
A user who wants to participate in an IDO might produce a credential showing their residency in a jurisdiction that supports IDO participation without ever giving additional fine-grained information like their address. This is referred to as selective disclosure in the industry. Web3 may benefit from identity management systems that ensure all parties engaged in a transaction, as well as all DAO events and airdrops, are unique and confirmed.
Digital identifiers (Digital IDs) are references to qualities in an individual's identification (e.g., a passport's passport number, an ID's age) that confirm an individual's identity and validate their eligibility to access services or information. Large organizations often control these digital IDs, which contain a variety of personal information such as an individual's age, gender, or address, and manage and analyze this data for marketing and advertising reasons.
How does a decentralized identity work?
You may generate your own DID or have one created for you by a DID provider like Fractal. Then you ask issuers (such as the government, a school, or a bank) to furnish claims against it for verification. DIDs, unlike standard digital IDs, are not kept in vendor or organization databases, making them less vulnerable to data breaches or theft. These DIDs may be used for a variety of purposes, including providing trustworthy and private client KYC, e-Voting, tax payments, and event check-ins, among others. For data owners and ID users, Fractal ID technology provides transparency and returns authority to users by letting them to establish IDs and store credentials within their own wallets, with the ability to choose who those credentials are shared with.
To illustrate the working technique of a DID, consider the following example. Imagine you're taking a study loan as a student. The financial institution must demand for all your necessary documents showing your eligibility and payback strategy. This information must then be verified by the financial institution before accepting your offer. If you have a DID, your wallet will produce one-of-a-kind identifiers for your credentials for which you have a private key. These IDs' public keys are then broadcast to a distributed ledger. You may offer these verified decentralized IDs of your credentials to the financial institution, which you can revoke and delete their access to at any moment. It's also worth noting that you may give the financial service provider access to particular areas of your data. For example, you may use a DID to share your financial earning information with the financial institution without having to provide them all of your contract data.
DIDs are multidimensional and are changing the way we think about privacy. According to reports, more than 4,000 data breaches would have been publicly exposed by the end of 2021, exposing 22 billion sensitive details. Because user identification data is stored in a single system, it is very vulnerable to cyberattacks and breach of privacy. Decentralized identity solutions, on the other hand, open up a new perspective by giving users and service providers more control over their identities and personal data. Decentralized identity has as one of its main goals the creation of protocols that will enable internet users to decide which apps and services gain access to specified categories of personally identifiable information (PII).
Furthermore, granting access to several third parties or service providers from various applications makes it more difficult for consumers to maintain their personal data and withdraw access to it. To solve these problems, users must own and govern their digital identities, preferably from a single source.
