RE: Is EOS’s new Social Media Platform VOICE.com Facebook 2.0 Mark of the Beast?
From what I understand, a Voice account is about transparency not "free speech" or optimized for maximum self expression. In my opinion this is not a problem as long as the marketing of what Voice is supposed to be is done in an honest fashion. It's not meant for private or personal communication.
This does not mean Voice does not have important uses. Sometimes when we want to give people a Voice we do it so people CAN be held accountable for what they say. My take on this is in order to thrive on something like Voice you cannot be "self serving" but you have to serve the community.
When you speak on Voice you don't speak merely how you felt about which team won the superbowl or go on a drunk tirade. The bar is for that kind of communication. Voice is for when you want to communicate something as a representative of a community of others who will back what you say.
If you have enough people standing behind you then you can speak confidently because you know you're not just speaking for yourself but for your community. When I posted on Steem on the topic of privacy it was because I did not see a large portion of the crypto community demographic being represented. It was because I saw also some sort of dishonest marketing where people were making what I interpreted as false claims. One such false claim is that you must choose to give up privacy for security or that you somehow cannot have privacy with transparent elements.
In my posts I highlighted the Enigma Protocol which offers a different approach from what Voice and EOS are doing. I highlighted this different approach so that the community could have enough information to choose for themselves which path is best by having knowledge of all the current technical options available.
In my current opinion from my understanding of our technical options I do believe we can have both transparency in the sense that there can be reputation, identity, and accountability, all whilst maintaining privacy. This is possible because you can now have encrypted smart contracts. In my opinion the breakthrough the Enigma team has made is as big as the breakthrough Satoshi Nakamoto made with the Nakamoto consensus. It provides new options, for enabling trust, for producing transparency, and for maximizing accountability. A human being does not have to ever see certain data as certain data can be computed while in an encrypted state. Certain data absolutely must be kept encrypted and certain data has to be impossible to link back to a physical person. Certain data also needs to be shared in such a way that algorithms can use the data without the original owner losing control of the data. For examples, if we want the true opinions of the community (real community sentiment) we will never be able to get it from something like Voice. We will require some way to do opinion polls, surveys, where the participants are anonymous from each other but where the smart contract can verify that each participant is a unique specific human being.
In my opinion, a platform like Voice is more suited for when you know what the community sentiment is and you can speak in a unified voice. Example is any one of us could choose a person from Steem to speak for a certain demographic on Steem over the Voice platform. In that way only one of us would have to take the risk of speaking it. Another alternative is we can all make accounts on Voice and use Voice for official or formal or more precise modes of communication.
Some people want a sanitized safe place of communication on the Internet. Not everyone wants raw interaction with other people. In a polite society, I recommend taking the polite approach to communication. When reputations in the real world are on the line with every sentence then I would expect that etiquette plays a much bigger role and that careful choice of words will be rewarded on such a platform. Of course these are just my predictions and truthfully a platform like Voice is a complete experiment because even Facebook as far as I know does not require biometric authentication and then store the communications on a forever storage blockchain. Note, I do not know for sure where certain information like biometrics will be stored and it might not be on a blockchain but it's still linked to a blockchain.
What an amazing comment @dana-edwards
Seriously I appreciate your effort and time.
Yours, Piotr
Thank you for your detailed comment.
I suppose you may be right in that this may be the direction they want to proceed it. A big part of the problem, however, is how blindly the masses jump into such platforms without really considering the privacy implications.
I do hope if they (Block.one/Voice) take this route that they themselves will be more transparent about it and not simply radically change their privacy policy once a big share of users are in their matrix, as Facepuke, and Twatter have already done on multiple occasions.
Time will tell. And to me personally, there is nothing to indicate it will be any different just by looking at who they have partnered with and who are controlling them.