Guy Davies explains how Blockpass protects your personal information
Guy Davies chatted with Crypto Finder about how Blockpass aims to give people back control of their personal information.
Interview from Blockchain Week London on 23 January 2018.
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Read the transcript:
My name is Guy Davies, I'm business development for Blockpass in the UK and Europe.
Blockpass is an ID-verification protocol, which is a layer of protocol which sits on the blockchain. So what this enables is, the bigger picture is KYC, KYD, KYO: know your customer, know your device for the Internet of Things, know your object – diamonds, art, etc, etc. It enables an interaction between humans, devices and objects on the blockchain basically, which is recorded, immutable, transparent, accountable.
And what form do those processes take on the blockchain? How's it work?
Well, currently, and we'll just concentrate it on KYC at the moment, so KYC is a bit of an issue in the world of cryptocurrency, ICOs and blockchain, and a lot of ICOs aren't using the due diligence of KYC, which is basically to verify who is actually investing in the ICO. Very soon, regulators will start to clamp down on that all around the world.
So what Blockpass does is enable a one-time KYC process. So you would go through this process once. We would then destroy the data that we verified you with. You would end up with a hash key, and you would then use that hash key to access – it's a gateway to other blockchain companies, which is basically the KYC process in one hash key and it takes a fraction of the time and costs a fraction of the cost at the moment.
I mean, that seems, for business, pretty essential to me, how are people getting away with not doing it?
Well, right now, the crypto world is so new, the regulators are caught napping a little bit. So they're going to start to sort of close in on that. Absolutely, KYC right now in mainstream companies is a massive issue. It takes up a huge amount of time, and they have to employ a lot of people, especially when you get into the trading element, in the investing element in finance. The level of verification is very high and it takes a long time.
This takes all of that out of the picture, and also, which is really important moving forward, the European Union is introducing GDPR in May, which is basically data protection regulation. And all companies will have to know the data they have, why they have it, they're not allowed to sell it. They've got to keep it in a very secure place. It's got to be updated as well, so this really helps with moves beyond that problem basically.
And what's going to happen to enterprises that aren't enforcing this process properly when regulators get involved?
Well, the regulators have said you will see the first 20 million pound fine this year, so that's all you need to hear. And they are going to be brutal.
And so why aren't people doing this themselves?
There's just, there's never been any regulation, really. And what's happened over the last few years, and I think this is why GDPR is really, has become key and a pressing issue is if you look at the way large digital corporations work, like Facebook and Google, for instance, they just automatically hoover up the details of who you are, your demographic details, your gender, your age and then this is used to create an algorithm around advertising.
And we all know what happens around that. So that paradigm has shifted with blockchain and because blockchain is immutable and it's transparent, those things are just not going to happen and there's a lot of brilliant blockchain companies who are popping up.
So for instance on the social media front, you can go to Steamit or Earn, and they will pay you to post content. Then there's a great company called BitClave and YourBlock as well which means advertisers will ask for you to reveal some of your identity and therefore pay you to say, well you know, if you're male or female in a certain age range, they will show you some clothes or some, I don't know, whatever you're into.
So, that's where the whole thing shifts over 180 degrees, and the most important phrase for me that's coming out of this is called self-sovereignty, which means the user has complete ownership over their data and what happens, and that's really exciting.
