It feels sometimes like every day we hear about another exploitation either on purpose or due to a security issue at one of the almost infinite service providers. It doesn’t really matter the cause of these disasters, the fact is as long as we continue to put our trust in third parties to protect our information we will continue to fall prey to their laziness and greed.

Even companies and groups that we normally would have considered to be bastions of security, or so we would have assumed like government organizations and institutions have proven to be nothing more than what amounts to a bunch of kids playing with our data. The biggest breaches in the last few years have come from some of the most trusted organizations like Equifax. What’s the most upsetting thing is the incompetence shown by these groups, it’s not as if they failed to use top of the line encryption or were the target of giant coordinated attacks, no in many cases these platforms didn’t even basic encryption and best practices in place to protect their users' data.

That’s why teams like COVA (Covalent.ai) have continued to push their plans to take back that control and put it back where it needed to be since day one. It’s our data so shouldn’t we be in control of it, you wouldn’t hand your life savings over to every vendor when you wanted to buy some bread, why would you hand over all kinds of important data about your life to log in to a random website. As it currently stands that’s exactly what we do when we deal with our data to an almost shocking level.

The idea from COVA (Covalent.ai) centers around taking back that control and allowing each individual to manage their data, not just so we can safely secure our data, and trade it openly while never actually giving up control. With the latest innovations and improvements to blockchain technology, and a smart combination of both hardware-based Trusted Execution and Software based Policy controls that allow users to script access to their data. Instead of handing off data to third parties and them getting to choose what they do with it. Covalent controlled data enforces that your data may be shareable but it remains controllable.

Imagine a world where you can share your personal information with a bank or perform KYC with a Crypto Exchange, allowing them to access and validate the information you allow them to. But when you decide to close those accounts you get to completely revert access and take back your information from them. The entire concept of smart data as a basic building block for the future of the internet should be something every user hopes to see come to reality. Bringing with it hopefully a time where we don’t have to worry about the Facebooks of the future selling our data, unless we have our data set to allow them to share it beyond their internal usage, or some random exchange performing an Exit and taking with it millions of users personal data to exploit freely.