nanspro / the-social-network Goto Github PK

Why should we care about companies having a lot of data on us? We just use the services they provide for free and remain happy. Who would ever think about paying for facebook or instagram, right?

Well in march 2018 the biggest privacy scandal of our times happened and none other by facebook itself. A political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica, harvested around 50 million user's data.

This made all of us question whether we should trust these big institutions with our private data. But if we want to keep our data to ourselves then what are we gonna do with it, how are we gonna monetize it? And of course we'll have to pay to use services like facebook which we are so addicted to(a subscription based model).

So what can we do? Thanks to ocean protocol, we now have the tools to create such marketplaces where individuals can monetize their data and earn money. Even if we pay for services like facebook, if we control our own data we can earn money by ourselves and be safe and secure.

• https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-diagram
• https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/a-recent-history-of-facebook-scandals-26157
• https://thenextweb.com/insights/2018/04/25/why-should-you-care-if-google-and-facebook-own-your-data/

The Social Network is basically a marketplace on top of ocean protocol where users can sell their private facebook data. Users can specify their data into categories like:

• Likes and comments
• Photos and Videos
• Groups Joined
• Pages liked and many more so a user would just upload his data, he'd specify the no of months for the data and then choose a category and will upload it. User will set a price for his/her personal data in ocean tokens.

Now any purchaser (companies or maybe individuals) will explore the marketplace and look for different datasets and will buy whatever he likes, he'll have to pay the price the seller set and then once he buys that, the amount will be immediately transfered from escrow to seller.

Note: A user can justify the price of his data by giving extra info in description like what he does, his job, background, profile links for credibility etc.

I forked the commons marketplace and edited it to make a new marketplace specific to data related to facebook only.

Thanks to the great docs from ocean protocol and help from their devs team on gitter i was able to finish this on time. I didn't ran into many challenges as my starting point was commons which was already a working product. However i got lot of errors when i tried to tweak it according to my needs and since the project is quite big with lots of components, it took me some time to fix my mistakes but i did that by myself.

Going through lots of technical documents that OCEAN provided and understanding what it does and how great and flexible the architecture is (even though it looks complex at first :P) Being able to build a prototype for something which resonates with what i want in this world is quite amazing.

Learned lots of things on the technical side, like forking an open source project and tweaking it for my own use. Learned reading lots of docs!!