In Web 1.0 or 2.0, all information related to your interactions with online content is stored by the provider. You as the consumer don’t have ownership of your personal data collected during an internet session.
Web 3.0 is focused on making personal information private again. It builds on a growing movement to give users control over their data ownership and monetization. Web 3.0 encourages individuals to decide how they want to collect and store their data—and if and when they want to sell it, instead of companies collecting it for free.
At its core, Web 3.0 is an opt-in system, which goes far beyond onerous terms and conditions agreements that few people read. In the future of Web 3.0, you will be able to customize your personal preferences for your data, whether they are universal or specific.
- Universal Settings: You decide you don’t want any company in any domain to track your data, and you set your universal settings to private.
- Specific Settings: You decide you are willing to sell your information in certain areas of your life. For instance, you set your preferences to track and monetize all of your business and leisure travel information: how you get there, where you stay, what you do. But you don’t want to share any information related to entertainment, shopping or news, so you opt to keep all of that data private.
Your individual profile will identify what can and cannot be done with your data through blockchain-backed smart contracts, allowing advertisers or intermediaries to aggregate your data in exchange for payment through a clearinghouse. Web 2.0 has already optimized an efficient Dutch auction market structure, where the highest price of something being offered—for example, data or keywords—is determined after all bids have been accepted.