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Throughout much of the internet’s existence, we believed we were entering a harmless convenience economy: quicker browsing, smarter suggestions, and free services fueled by hidden advertising. The reality was a subtle transfer of power—from users to platforms, from independence to extraction, from consent to surveillance cloaked as convenience.
Summary
- Convenience gradually became surveillance: Web2 platforms and AI systems shifted power from users to corporations by extracting, modeling, and integrating our behavior, compromising privacy and autonomy without true consent.
- Web3 repeated this mistake inversely: In the pursuit of trust through radical transparency, blockchains laid bare user behavior on public ledgers, transforming self-sovereignty into a new form of constant surveillance.
- The next internet must prioritize privacy by default: Genuine user control necessitates protocol-level encryption where data is concealed by default, transparency is optional, and individuals determine what to disclose—restoring agency without sacrificing functionality.
The modern internet no longer merely accommodates our interactions; it scrutinizes us. Every online action—including purchases, scrolling, location signals, messages, pauses, or late-night searches—contributes to a behavioral model we never consciously opted into. Our personal data has transformed into the foundational material of an omnipresent surveillance economy that knows more about us than we would ever openly express.
These revelations are significant. They track political views, infer sexual orientation, predict mental health issues, anticipate relationship stresses, and analyze our impulse triggers with remarkable accuracy. The largest platforms didn’t rise to power by creating superior software; they did so by crafting more accurate profiles of us.
Amid this, we gradually became unaware of the shift. The loss of autonomy didn’t occur with a grand announcement; it happened through nudges, consents, cookies, and defaults that remained largely misunderstood, yet everyone clicked “accept.”
Then AI arrived and exacerbated the issue.
AI didn’t return control to users—it industrialized intimacy
AI systems promise utility, creativity, and productivity. However, beneath the friendly chat interfaces lies a more sophisticated extractive logic than anything Web2 ever attempted. To “learn,” these models rely on our inputs—our prompts, conversations, writing styles, photos, emotional cues, frustrations, secrets, and metadata—all of it.
People often treat AI systems as private diaries or digital confidants. They are not. The largest AI companies actively gather, store, analyze, and train on the very information people think is transient and confidential.
The consequences are severe. For the first time, not just corporations but computational systems are learning our behavioral boundaries, vulnerabilities, and preferences. While Web2 compromised privacy by hoarding our data, AI encroaches on it by internalizing our inner lives.
The internet is entering a phase where machines comprehend us not by what we explicitly disclose but through the fragments we provide, piecing together a version of ourselves that might be more accurate than our own self-awareness.
Web3 promised sovereignty—then inadvertently designed total exposure
Crypto arose as a philosophical uprising against this power concentration. The industry pledged self-sovereignty: ownership over our assets, identity, and data. However, in practice, the initial generation of Web3 systems made a different error. In their quest to solve trust, they embedded radical transparency into everything.
Blockchains transformed human behavior into public ledgers. Wallet flows, transaction histories, social connections, financial habits—each detail available to anyone, eternally. This created a paradox: the technology meant to empower individuals ultimately fostered an ideal environment for surveillance. Today, chain analytics firms can profile users with a precision that banks, governments, and advertisers could barely imagine.
Web2 seized our data. Web3 revealed it. Both frameworks bypassed the user’s right to choose. Yet, the solution isn’t to renounce decentralization but to rethink it.
The next era of the internet
The fundamental issue linking Web2 and Web3 is quietly simple: users do not dictate what others can observe. We need a paradigm shift at the very core of the next internet—and we are laying the groundwork for this shift at TEN Protocol. Instead of merely encrypting addresses or disguising transactions, TEN embeds encryption at the protocol level. Everything—state, storage, computation, logic, user interactions—is fully encrypted end-to-end. Not wrapped. Not layered. Natively integrated.
This fundamental change unlocks a completely different design landscape:
- Developers cannot extract behavioral data from users.
- Third parties cannot monitor how, when, or why users engage with applications.
- dApps cannot embed concealed telemetry, analytics, or profiling.
- Users can decide what to disclose, when, and to whom.
We term this smart transparency: privacy as the inherent state of computation, transparency as a conscious and user-driven choice. In practical terms, this means:
- You can confirm eligibility for a service without revealing your identity.
- You can engage in DeFi without disclosing your entire wallet history to the public or risking front-running.
- AI agents can function on-chain without exposing your personal details.
- dApps can verify parameters without over-collecting or retaining unnecessary data.
Developers maintain complete programmability. Users regain control.
People aren’t trying to hide; they’re trying to choose.
A common misconception about privacy is that people desire to vanish. In truth, most individuals are more than willing to share information—provided they understand what they’re sharing, with whom it’s shared, and what they receive in return.
Privacy is not the same as secrecy. Privacy is the right to self-disclose on one’s conditions. Web2 stripped that right away by transforming consent into a meaningless click. Web3 eliminated it by making transparency a default for every action. The next generation of the internet must restore that equilibrium.
The upcoming decade will revolve around a revival of something that should never have been lost: the individual’s control over their data. We are on the brink of a pivotal moment in the internet’s progress. Artificial intelligence is advancing at an incredible rate, blockchain infrastructure is evolving beyond its experimental stages, and our digital identities now influence everything from our transactions to our understanding of ourselves.
Yet, unless users reclaim their agency over their digital presence, the internet will continue to veer towards a future where our behavior is more comprehensible to algorithms than to us. The guiding principle must be unmistakably clear: Data belongs to the individual who generates it. Transparency should be an optional act, not a mandatory requirement. Applications should operate without delving into the private lives of users. And privacy should not be an elite feature available only to the tech-savvy; it should be the default state of the digital landscape.
If the preceding decade was characterized by platforms absorbing our information, the next will be defined by our assertive efforts to reclaim it. The solution lies not in urging trust in new institutions but in developing systems that eliminate the need for trust altogether. When privacy is inherent, and transparency is intentional, users finally— and undeniably—regain control.
The divide is already apparent in today’s internet architecture: we rely on blockchains for securing value, yet we confine users to transacting within transparent confines. No substantial financial system, no effective coordination layer, can operate under this contradiction. The next wave of foundational and execution layers is emerging specifically to address this imbalance—not by promising secrecy but by enabling choice. If this decade is meant for anything, it is for systems that institute privacy as the default condition and reveal only what is essential. When we reconstruct the internet on those principles, user sovereignty transitions from an ideal to a fundamental standard.
