Nim founder and Chelsea Manning discuss decentralization and privacy.

The growing demand for privacy and protection of users' data is a topic that people around the world are reminded of on a daily basis recently. For example, just two days ago, on December 11, Toyota warned its customers about a possible data breach, saying, “Confidential personal and financial information was exposed in the attack.”

Hackers, breaches, and exploits happen so often that someone can claim to have breached user data using crypto-famous hacks and protocols. To name a few, there was the Kid Security parental control app hack, which resulted in 300 million data records being compromised.

Consumer genetics and research company 23andMe suffered a breach in October that put 20 million records at risk. Even MGM was hacked in September, and estimates suggest the hack cost the production studio at least $100 million.

It is clear that data is a precious resource, and hackers are the private people of today. Furthermore, corporations and governments struggle to protect themselves and their customers from data breaches, and because of this weakness, customers and citizens must make every effort to protect their own personal information.

One of the first and easiest steps to protect certain types of data from prying eyes is to use a virtual private network (VPN) when browsing the Internet. But even VPNs are completely unhackable, and quite a few secretly store records of users' Internet traffic and share such records with parties they choose not to access. So, once again it falls to the consumer to trust that the VPN they choose won't reveal user data.

In Episode 25 of The Agenda Podcast, hosts Ray Salmond and Jonathan DeYoung talk with NIM Founder and CEO Harry Halpin and NIM Security and Hardware Consultant Chelsea Manning about how blockchain-based MixNet and other decentralized entities are being used to power VPNs. Protection of users' personal data.

Interestingly, most VPNs are also centralized.

Thanks to clever marketing, many people think that VPNs protect you from malicious hackers lurking on the Internet, and hide your activities and user data from providers, entities and other organizations that monitor user activity.

Halpin explained on VPN:

“You send all your data to someone else's computer, and they see everything you do. They know everything they do. So if you send your VPN data to ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Mullvad VPN they know everything about you. They know your IP address. You will be connected to your billing information. They know which websites to visit. It's really scary. “

NIM's mixnets, on the other hand, send encrypted data across multiple servers, and Halpin explains that it adds “a little bit of fake information” and “does what Mixnet does on the tin at every hop.”

“It shuffles the data. So each packet is like a card, and it's like shuffling the cards and sending them to the next server and sending them to the next server.”

Related: How to protect your privacy online

Mixnets have been around since the 1980s and rely on multiple servers, which is less than ideal in some situations. According to Halpin, this is where nim comes into play:

“The Nim founder's concept is that you take a blockchain, you record all the people who have volunteered their servers on the blockchain with their key materials, IP addresses, etc., so that users can find them. You give them some kind of reputation to know if they're good or not. And then you pay them with a cryptocurrency-based incentive system.” .

Chelsea Manning explains why people should “use as much encryption as possible”.

When asked if trying to protect user data and privacy is a valid point, Manning said, especially given the serious incidents of data breaches and governments monitoring citizens' online activities.

“The more people use privacy technology, the more difficult it is for these surveillance networks and tools to collect that information. And that's one of the reasons I recommend people use encryption whenever possible. I recommend using more sophisticated methods, and not everyone can use it. Not everyone needs that privacy protection as much as they do.” No. Q. Not everyone needs to use a VPN. But the more people do, the stronger those protections get, right?”

“There was a clear arms race between the regulator and the person trying to protect their communications and their data,” Manning explained. And it's true that these government actors and big corporate actors like Internet service providers have a significant asymmetry in terms of their computing power, their ability to gather information, their ability to analyze information.

According to Manning, the challenge regulators face is that “knowing the value of the relationship” is a “haystack problem.”

“So you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the biggest haystack, the smallest needle, is the hardest to find. And so this is where privacy technology comes in, right? It's about trying to bridge the gap between monitoring capabilities and your data protection capabilities.

To hear more of Halpin and Manning's conversation with The Agenda, listen to the entire episode on Cointelegraph's Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And don't forget to check out Cointelegraph's full lineup of other shows!

Magazine: XChina dev fined 3 years salary for VPN service, 10m e-CNI airdrop: Asia Express

This article is not intended for general information purposes and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, ideas and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.