Here’s how we protect your private parts

The H4X Project is a showcase of Tide Protocol’s open source ‘trustless’ data privacy technology — removing the need for trust when relying on third parties to protect sensitive data. The protocol also provides the incentive for organizations to embrace privacy and affect meaningful change at scale. H4X invites the community to discover and address any flaws in the Tide Protocol, with a bitcoin bounty.

7 trillion U.S. dollars. That’s going to be the value of personal data globally by 2020, if the European Commission estimates are any indication. You can guess what your share of that value’s going to be. However, the real question is: what share will the hackers have? How far will they go to get it?

At this very moment, cyber hackers from around the world are actively working to steal your personal data, to sell for profit on the black market or impersonate you. Most likely, they’ve already stole it, but don’t take it from me. Verify it here: HaveIBeenPwned. Your data is stolen from companies you’ve willingly given it. In most cases, those companies also sell it for profit themselves on an open market.

With a new data breach happening every day — it’s clear this is a problem affecting everyone. It’s neither a small or easy problem to tackle, and while most will say it’s a boring one — we found an exciting solution! We called it The Tide Protocol.

So, Mr. business, you need my details? Fine but here’s the twist: from now on, you get my data locked. You can still keep it, but I hold the only key. Need access sometimes? Ask me every time. Want to sell it? Pay me. Why would a business even consider adopting such an approach, you ask? Liability, man. And lots of it. Dear Hacker has been working your backdoors for a while now and it’s just a matter of time until you’re in the news. Would you prefer having your customer’s affairs out in the open or have some useless locked boxes stolen? Not to mention Mr. Government enforcing GDPR and the likes to tear you a new one when that happens. Know what? Why talk about the stick when we should focus on the carrot? Even a corner store has customer data that’s valuable to someone. What if that data was automatically offered for sale (securely of course) in a global ecosystem — with the explicit consent of the customer? After all, they’re getting a clip every time it’s being sold.

That’s the concept of the Tide Protocol, in a nutshell. An open-source framework, governed by the Tide Foundation, a community-driven non-profit organization offering it for free. This framework has been developed over several years out of commercial necessity within a closed enterprise space, but with the recent proliferation of Blockchain technology, the missing element of ‘trustlessness’ made it possible to open it up as a collaborative industry standard that doesn’t require a centralized entity to control it. Check our explainer video on our website to understand the extent of it.

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