Centralized Online Stores are Vulnerable!

The 30th US President Calvin Coolidge once said, “No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted, which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.” This was written down in the book authored by Mahatma Gandhi in 2005 entitled “All men are brothers”. The point here is, even way back then (Coolidge was the US President from 1923 to 1929), and even from someone with the highest authority during his term, the idea of centralization was never a good idea.

So, what’s wrong with centralization?

The huge amount of power that centralization has is providing business tyrants the key to the gates of your information and data privacy. Let’s take Facebook, for example. Twenty years ago, or so, whoever wanted to read news and information online would simply go to their choice of websites and blogs. Today, everyone who uses social media platforms to obtain news and information, Facebook dictates whatever they should read, losing their freedom of choice in this matter. Another good example is Google, which processes more than 5 billion queries every single day. Imagine what will happen if Facebook or Google turns evil. They can easily manipulate the information you wanted, or so you thought, and there’s nothing much you can do about it. That’s because they have the power of centralization.

In our lives spent using the internet, we have seen how private and centralized internet stores who own local servers, are vulnerable. The centralized architecture of these stores, bring some serious privacy issues. We never really know what is going on behind their curtains therefore, we don’t know what, and how much data they are collecting from us, and what they use it for. You might be surprised to know that Facebook knows about your family secrets more than you do just like what one Facebook user discovered recently. In a different story, a Tinder user found out that the platform keeps more than 800 pages of her darkest secrets. Now, that’s scary!

Centralization makes local servers vulnerable to hackers and fraud. If such activities happen, it opens up to another vulnerability factor, which is the possibility of the entire network to collapse or shut down. What’s even worse is, it could greatly affect the users that they may even take their own life. Familiar with the case of the cheating site AshleyMadison.com, where hackers attacked it and leaked the most intimate information of about 40 million users? That event led to the suicide of at least two of those users. How much further can it go even worst?

The whole point of this matter is that there is a solution against all these vulnerabilities – decentralization. Decentralized markets are where the platforms are the networks itself. No one can hack it; therefore, it can’t be shut down or taken down regardless if the majority of its hubs is suppressed simultaneously. It would prevent breaches in data since there are no single data stores for the storage of information. You have the power to protect your data and who you share it with. The decentralized markets work perfectly for everyone with its peer-to-peer network structure. The question is, how willing are you to get out of your comfort zones and leave the centralized internet stores such as Facebook and Google that you all are so attached to now, to obtain true freedom on the internet?