How To Protect Digital Privacy And Freedom Of Expression | The Future Rules Podcast Ep.4
Powered by the Filecoin Foundation, The Future Rules is hosted by Forkast. News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau, alongside top legal mind in blockchain and Filecoin Foundation Board Chair, Marta Belcher. Together with some of the most renowned names in the industry as their special guests, they dive into the future and the ethical issues that technology will raise, and how to address them today before they determine our tomorrow.
In this episode of The Future Rules podcast, Rainey Reitman, who is leading civil liberties advocate and Board Member for the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, tackles the need for digital privacy and how that is evolving with Web 3. She takes in financial censorship and how it affects freedom of expression, goes on to how cryptocurrencies can help enhance civil liberties, the issues thrown up by the US infrastructure bill, and how changing the way the web incentivizes users could benefit us all.
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HIGHLIGHTS
Financial censorship has nothing to do with the law:
“Our own PayPal account was suddenly frozen. And to me, this was such an eye-opener that PayPal could decide whether or not a legal defense fund and an advocacy organization would be able to receive funds. Now, we were able, through public pressure, to get PayPal to reverse its decision. But even the fact that public pressure was so effective made me realize that it didn't have anything to do with the law or anything like that. It was basically the whims of this payment intermediary, deciding whether or not we could accept payments through their services.” (Rainey Reitman)
The problem with payment providers influencing the free expression:
“I don't think that the banking partners and Visa and MasterCard and PayPal have the in-house expertise to make the kind of difficult, nuanced decisions about balancing rights of free expression, looking at the jurisprudence, thinking about international law, to have a deep understanding of the consequences of basically trying to dictate what can and can't exist online and these are huge decisions, and trying to expect a payment provider who we have not elected to make those decisions on behalf of society is bananas.” (Rainey Reitman)
How blockchain can even out the financial playing field:
“One of the reasons [financial censorship] has become so problematic is because there's really not a lot of competition in the payment services industry today because even if you do have interesting new startups trying to offer new services, all of them are beholden to Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. And then there's this big question about alternative systems, including blockchain systems that are offering cryptocurrency, that might basically break out of the mold, and offer a new way and a new approach that is not as beholden on existing financial services. And I'm fascinated by this idea, particularly if it can help prompt better services so that users and websites are not so beholden to these big payment providers.” (Rainey Reitman)
Crypto adoption may be a wake-up call for financial giants:
“I think it's not only interesting because those [censored] businesses and websites might be able to receive payments for whatever they're offering or donations, which is certainly valid and important, but also because it will increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies and more people will get exposure to them as an alternative path to the existing financial systems. It's going to be a wake-up call for some of these big financial giants that have basically not moved over or really realized the opportunities around serving these other markets.“ (Rainey Reitman)
Cryptocurrency can restore our digital privacy:
“While cryptocurrency is not a perfect solution to some of these things [digital payment tracking], it's going to maintain more privacy in some regards and less privacy in others than credit card transactions. But there are lots of innovations happening in the cryptocurrency space that have the promise of bringing those privacy-centric values that we had around cash and which have been around all our lives, and they exist whenever we pay for something with a ten-dollar bill and basically port that into a digital future so that we can have online payments, but not give up our privacy.” (Rainey Reitman)
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