Hi everyone,
Like many of you, I have developed severe “data-slurp fatigue.” But beyond privacy concerns, I’ve come to realize it’s a massive architectural inefficiency: we are wasting storage and risking security through the aggressively growing duplication of our home addresses and emails across millions of servers just to complete basic digital actions.
As a counterweight to this, I formulated an architectural concept called UYC: Unknow Your Customer — the structural antithesis to ubiquitous KYC.
The core premise of UYC is that systems must be built so they physically cannot hold, see, or remember unnecessary personal data. Instead of hoarding information, architecture should naturally leverage cryptography and pseudonymization in scenarios where collecting, storing, or processing personal data is entirely unnecessary.
As a solo creator, I built Factflew (https://factflew.io/) specifically to test and prove that UYC is a viable foundation for a cleaner, independent web.
I’m bringing this to Lemmy to discuss the engineering reality of this approach:
- Is a UYC architecture viable at scale, or is the industry bound by too much engineering inertia when it comes to collecting data?
- How can we shift the developer mindset away from collecting everything “just in case”?
I am eager to hear your technical critique of the UYC principle and discuss whether we can build a leaner web. Cheers!
The thing with that is, it won’t be implemented in a capitalist system where companies will collect most of the data they can so they can sell it to ad companies, business partners and government intelligence who are all willing to pay big bucks for it.
The reason it doesn’t happen is not that there was no engineering architecture design to prevent it, but because no company is going to willingly break the iron law of “profits above all else” that capitalism requires.
The antithesis to all this is free open source alternatives, like Lemmy itself for instance, that don’t collect more data than they need for the simple reason that they are not built with the goal of profit in mind.
So if we want a better web experience in the near future, the best thing you can do is convince people to use FOSS alternatives and create communities here instead of the giants like Reddit, Instagram etc.