DOGE Inspires New Efforts to Protect Data, and Maybe Change the Game
The shock of having privacy safeguards obliterated by the Musk White House team, leading many down new paths for protecting data privacy, security; startup Vana seeks to “reclaim” data
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
From a data privacy perspective, the worst case scenario is to have all your data exposed or made available to unknown actors you have no reason to trust.
The Trump Administration’s DOGE team is instilling this fear in many, many Americans, causing them to explore ways to hide their personal data from bad actors.
For Indigenous scientists, this exploration is leading down some very new paths. During their monthly Zoom meeting held in February, in the wake of the Trump-DOGE era attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, the Tribes fear they will lose access to federal dollars to support their research. They are concerned about the loss, theft, seizure or privatization of their research, which includes ancient cultural knowledge.
“There was this cascade that started happening,” stated Max Liboiron, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who hosts the virtual calls, in an account in The Verge. Seasoned from his experience as an activist with Occupy Wall Street, he moved quickly to protect his legacy as a member of the Red River Métis, the Indigenous peoples of Canada’s prairie provinces.
Some in the Indigenous communities are now concerned the government could use their data to conduct surveillance of their activities, or help extract valuable resources from their lands. “We have to have more control over how the settler-state represents us in data, how they collect data about us,” Liboiron stated. It’s not a new exercise; the Tribes began discussing data sovereignty in the ‘90s. “The movement comes out of an idea of mismanagement through bad data practices from the state,” Liboiron stated.
The Trump-DOGE team has upped the ante on data protection, introducing a new level of uncertainty given their stealth grabbing of sensitive federal data. “There’s an unknown relationship between what Musk can touch and our data,” Liboiron said.
Trying Private Servers
In response, his organization is looking into storing data on private servers located in foreign countries.
“The rule of law and norms of governance, the norms and laws of jurisdiction, no longer apply,” Liboiron stated. “Even if your data isn’t held by the federal government or funded by the federal government, it’s become very clear that different parts of the federal government can reach into almost anywhere and intervene.”
Liboiron directs the IndigeLab Network, whose members have identified three locations in Canada where Indigenous data can be stored securely. For cloud storage, they use CryptPad, an alternative to GoogleDocs based in France, and Sync, an alternative to Dropbox based in Canada.
“I’ve gone from basically protesting and staying safe to massively mobilizing resources with the same techniques,” Liboiron stated.
Beyond hiding data on private servers, individuals who want to hide from data brokers now have some alternatives.
Data Broker Removal Services Offered
OneRep, a software company based in McLean, Virginia, offers a service to remove private information from data brokers. In four years through 2024, the company has removed 23 million records, according to its website. Its removal system targets over 210 data brokers and people-search sites; it has 450,000 users, free and paid combined.
“People-search sites want you on their platform as they sell your information for profit,” states Aksana Serhiyenia, head of product, on the firm’s website. “Therefore, these sites make it very hard for you to “opt-out” or remove yourself, making it nearly a full-time job. Few people can afford this kind of time, or the alternative: hiring someone else to do the opt-outs manually. As a result, privacy becomes a luxury reserved for privileged groups.”
Writing on the company’s blog, OneRep CEO and founder Dimitri Shelest stated, “The less data circulates about you on the web, the harder it is for cybercriminals to exploit it. One simple step to reduce your digital footprint is to remove your data from people-search websites and data brokers. These resources gather publicly available information about you and either feature it openly or sell it to third parties. This information is often enough to piece together your profile and steal your identity for fraudulent purposes.”
Another alternative is Cloaked, based in New York City, which has removed over 200 million records from data brokers, according to its website. “Cloaked started as a way to take back control of one's identity through unique identities that made it difficult to aggregate information about you,” stated co-founder and CEO Arjun Bhatnagar on the firm’s website.
“Our goal is simple: to make privacy effortless, so you never have to trade security for convenience. Because privacy shouldn’t be an afterthought - it should be the default,” he states. The company has built a data removal tool, which came out of beta in October 2023. Today, the company reports having over 100,000 users, and has a commitment to data privacy and security.
“The rise of AI has made privacy harder to protect, but we’re using AI to fight back. We’re committed to constant innovation, using AI to detect threats, remove personal data, and help people stay protected. This is a long fight, and we’re in it for the long haul. Privacy is a fundamental right,” he states.
Vana Startup Offering New Value Proposition
Another alternative for how to hide is coming from a startup with new ideas about handling personal data, and striking a different deal with “owners” of the data.
Vana, derived from the word Nirvana, was born from an effort of Filipinos to reclaim their data from Big Tech platforms. Filipino tech expert Arthur Abal stated that “data is essentially a form of capital … Each person, including ordinary Filipinos, is sitting on a massive store of valuable data capital that companies are willing to pay for,” in an account from Inquirer.net, the news website of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
That point of view inspired Arthur Abal and Anna Kazlauskas, who met at the MIT Media Lab, to form Vana. Built on blockchain technology, Vana seeks to give users control over their data, providing a pathway for Filipinos to “liberate” their data from big tech. Abal is a corporate lawyer with a graduate degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School; Kazlauskas, whose mother is from Pampanga, studied computer science and economics at MIT.
After completing their studies, they worked on a research project aimed at revolutionizing data ownership. The two co-founded Vana in 2021 at the Open Data Labs in San Francisco, with the intention of enabling users to reclaim their data, combine it with data of others users in the chain and sell it to tech companies. Abal serves as chief operating officer; Kazlauskas as core contributor.
The idea attracted the attention of some leading crypto venture capitalists such as Paradigm and Polychain. Abal stated, “On-chain transactions on Vana make this process possible by allowing data to be grouped together and tokenized, unlocking its financial potential.” Cryptocurrency tokens are considered digital assets that can be exchanged for goods and services.
A test came in April 2024, spurred by Reddit users in an uproar that the platform struck a $60 million deal with Google to sell user data to help train Google’s AI models. The concerned Reddit users approached Vana with a proposal to create a data decentralized autonomous organization (DataDAO). They sought“to reclaim control over their data set that represented their contributions to the platform,” Abal stated. Anticipating modest participation, they amassed 140,000 participants within a week. They knew they were onto something big.
“This level of engagement was remarkable, especially considering that it can take months to collect even a fraction of that number of data points for similar initiatives,” Abal stated.
It could portend the dawn of a new era, in which users begin to strike a more fair deal over how their data is used, and maybe actually provide permission as appropriate and derive benefit from participating.
“The Reddit DataDAO exemplified how tokenization and community mobilization could intersect to challenge the status quo, ultimately providing a new model for data ownership and financial empowerment,” stated Abal. Bring it on.
Read the source articles and information in The Verge, on the blog of OneRep, on the website of Cloaked and from Inquirer.net.