Steganography and the nextgen internet
Steganography and the nextgen internet
a potential pathway for the "little people" to fight back
I had touched upon dystopian futures in a couple of my earlier articles. “And the future is dystopian” and “The Future is Creative”
But today what I read gave me some hope. In the last 10-20 years, many technology companies have grown by taking advantage of the internet. The big boys club of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix have grown to tremendous proportions riding on the back of the internet infrastructure.
Two of them, Google and Facebook have grown by the collection of user data to drive advertisement traffic to monetize the so-called “free” services - search, news, social networking, and point-to-point communications. These two are examples of countless others who are doing the same injustice to us, leaving us with limited options to fight back. This has left the “little people”, us the users at a major disadvantage.
The recent WhatsApp furor over their privacy policy change and the rapid shift of some privacy-minded users to Telegram and Signal signal a change in how the users could potentially fight back on these privacy issues.
Apart from point to point encryption, Signal’s work on offering the abilities to hiding the packets on the internet from being identified that they are from them, is the start of something big and new. The current approach or design to mask the packets might not be sustainable, but I am sure new ways will be found and these may expand from just being used for communication applications like Signal, Whatsapp, or Telegram, but might expand to all sort of uses to mask packets for even basic usage of the internet as we know it.
This is the kind of creative change that I predict will happen in the next decade - there will be a barrage of new inventors who will use technology solutions to find a way to hide data and information from the prying eyes of the big boys who monetize it and/or use it to their advantage. Both the public and the government kinds.
Yes, these might also lead to the growth of some criminal activities, but anything that grows to protect the general privacy of all internet users, in my mind is the “new internet” or “nextgen internet” and something that might give privacy back to the “little people” - us. And potentially fix the flaw on how the internet should have been, ground up - instead of what it has grown today to be.
Sources:
Signal ignores proxy censorship vulnerability, bans researchers
What is Steganography?