Your data Your asset

How decentralized rural development is similar to your data?

This won’t be so obvious, but the concept of decentralization to rural development and VALID’s mission to empower citizens with a trusted digital identity and full control over their personal data, have something in common.

Decentralization means empowerment of individuals at all levels of organization and they decide for themselves rather than depending on centrally administered support programs. Through decentralization of government functionaries, the end beneficiary or the end user will have a say in the planning and implementation of the schemes.

This leads to rural development through proper decision making, understanding the difficulties and complexities and then evaluating the outcome, fostering the sense of belonging for the overall rural development. Healthcare, education or infrastructure development, decentralization empowers the rural population across the segment. Each individual act as a discretionary decision maker, can influence formulation and implementation of policies in a democratize way.

After going through this, one gets a feeling that there’s a strong link between the concept of decentralization to rural development and the concept behind VALID’s ‘Your Data Your Asset’.

We live in an age of smartphones and omnipresent connectedness through social networking sites, games or any other mobile application. In this digital age, people are unaware of phone data snooping and privacy they give away while accessing through such sites. In order to get your privacy and the control of your data back, VALID through its platform will help user control, safeguard and share their data when they so choose.

This digital identity platform will expand and inculcate individual users’ personal data space such as credit card transactions, geolocation logs and browsing history. Users are worried and are looking for decentralized tools such as VALID where users and data consumers come together, buy and sell data in a fully controlled environment. The VALID wallet allows identity holders to manage their personal data in a self-sovereign manner as well as to monetise that data using a secure, privacy protecting platform that they fully control.

A brief research of ongoing lawsuits about illegal data collection, will give you a feeling about the dangers of what we are going through. Users will ask what we can do to stop such things and there are various thoughts on how to handle such issues, VALID has a novel way to go about it. Instead of top-down approach, VALID prefers giving power back to the consumers, will make user and data consumer together a stakeholder. User will have real access and stake in the data marketplace, and can monetize the data as and when desire.

This whole concept of giving back the control of the data to the user is as essential as decentralized rural development. When you think about how technology will advance in future and how critical the data collection will be, this concept will be very close to monitor.

Website: http://www.valid.global/
Whitepaper: https://valid.global/static/valid-wp-2.pdf