Internet made our life easy, using the internet we can do almost anything. I can do money transfer, I can apply for job, I share my picture, location, activities with my friends using social media sites there is lots of fun I can do using internet. But whatever we do online, we always have specific purpose behind it. We don’t want our data to be used for any other purpose than I want to, but is it really the case? If I upload my educational background and work experience at any job portal site to find a job, will this data being used for providing my suitable job offer to me? If I done any online transaction, my card data is deleted after use? If I visited any location, restaurant or any place, will that info have kept only for me as reference? You can ask any question regarding personal data safety, security, and confidentiality, the answer as of now is always NO. What if you want to restrict the use of personal data, well there is law which can protect use of your personal data. But whenever you do any only activity, you always have to agree to Terms and conditions of the service providers, you can’t really force these people when and how to use your data. These entities will never allow you to select option about how to sue your data, the reason is they earn money by selling your personal information to other entities for marketing purpose for selling other products and all.





Covalent -

What option do we have in such case? Well, till now there was no practical solution available, but in future you will be able to decide how your data should be used, and by whom and until what time. Covalent came up with concept which allows you to decide how your data should be used. By whom and how many times, or until what time, etc. Basically, Covalent offers you the features to write your own policy or set of policies aka rules which allows ro stops others from using your data. Covalent is a Smart Policy Platform, it is a new addition to the Internet protocol suite that allows you to specify and enforces how data should be used. Under the Covalent protocol, data carries a "smart policy" which is specified in programming language and is enforceable by code. So, using Covalent’s smart policy feature, you can proactively specify how and who should use your personal information.





Here are few examples of smart policies which user can set -

• that my credit card number may only be used once for a one-time charge. It will be erased from the server after the payment is completed.

• that a patient’s CT Scan may be processed by an aggregate function and not rendered individually.

• that my Snapchat photo may only be rendered individually and not be processed by facial recognition.

• that these text messages can only be viewed after tonight.

• that this e-book can only be shared 15 times.

• that a shopper’s mobile GPS data may not be used with her other data to construct an intrusive customer profiling.

• that k-anonymity or differential privacy is applied before my data can be used in aggregate.

• that only a specific open-source codebase can use my data.

• an ad or disclaimer has to be viewed before the rest of the content





This is really a cool concept, right? Until now, we were expecting that entities should give us option to select how our data should be used, but we kept waiting for the same. Now you don’t have to depend on any entity to give you option to specify how your data should be used, instead now you can hardcode it in policies.





For more information about COVA project, you can visit their official channel

Website: http://www.covalent.ai

Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken

Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/

Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki



