Facebook CEO reflects on Blockchain based User data authentication
The prominent figure in IT world, Facebook CEO – Mark Zuckerberg recently made comments on how blockchain based authentication system for user data can eliminate usage of the third-party systems.
In an interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain on Feb. 20, Zuckerberg quoted that use case involving a blockchain system can help foster the decentralized nature and thus exclude the need to trust your data in centralized force. He is of opinion that the current
Specifically, the ‘Facebook Connect’ is doing the job of bringing all authentication to be done via
In short he quoted that,
Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice to log into places without going through an intermediary
Besides the end user, the developers can also be profited by this arrangement in a way to not relying on corporations that can cut off users’ access. But such a system will have its own moral implications.
“I think the more interesting questions there are not feasibility in the near term, but are the philosophical questions of the goodness of a system like that one “- Mark said. With that statement no doubt a decentralized system may give users more control over their data but how would that affect society.
On the same lines he further questioned that,
The question is, do you really want that? Do you have more cases where yes people would be able to not have an intermediary but there’d be more instances of abuse and recourse would be much harder?
On the flip side, Mark stated how Facebook is moving toward a more decentralized structure by offering encryption in its messaging services. The advantages of such an encrypted system would be privacy and security, but further stressed the importance of safety given that “people rightfully have an expectation of us [Facebook], that we are going to do everything we can to stop terrorists from recruiting people or people from exploiting children”.
Also, highlighting the technical challenges that his team has come across while moving towards decentralization – “Certainly the level of computation that Facebook is doing is really intense to do in a distributed way,” he said. “Decentralized things that are computationally intensive will be harder. They’re harder to do computation on, but eventually, maybe you have the resources to do that “.
Recently we also saw the social giant had reportedly acquired, blockchain startups. Among which Chainspace in its first apparent blockchain-related acquisition. The startup was reportedly working on blockchain scalability problems, notably by applying to shard the smart contracts.
What do you think of Mark Zuckerberg’s opinion towards blockchain? Let us know in the comment section below.
Image Credit: Thoughtcatalog