America at a crossroads: Commissioner Peirce’s parting challenge

The needle is rarely found in the haystack. Yet the law is designed as if the bigger the haystack is, the easier it is to find the needle, when the opposite is true. The status quo leaves the government with an enormous cache of consumer data it must sift through, looking for evidence of criminal activity. And the consequences of this mass collection and storage of data are stark. Centralized stores of data make breaches far more damaging, exposing consumers to greater harm and jeopardizing our collective national security. Mandated disclosures also feed data brokers, who scrape public filings and records to build and sell detailed profiles that companies use to target, price, and profit from consumers. And mass surveillance leaves Americans — regardless of their political beliefs — vulnerable to censorship and discrimination. The dire state of digital privacy will only worsen as AI becomes more integrated into everyday life, collecting more data and enabling more sophisticated surveillance and profiling of individuals.

But America does not have to go down the road of endless surveillance. There is another path at Commissioner Peirce’s crossroads that we can take, one where consumer privacy is not sacrificed in the name of security. The two are not mutually exclusive, thanks to innovation in privacy-enhancing technology, much of which is native to the blockchain ecosystem. Blockchain infrastructure may allow individuals to transact while maintaining complete control over their personal information, and transaction records are public and secure. Zero-knowledge proofs enable selective disclosure, allowing an individual to demonstrate that they’re permitted to transact without disclosing any unnecessary information. Verifiable credentials can use this technology to prove that a person is trustworthy and genuine without revealing their identity.