Sharing personal information over social media is very common, but do you know that this information can be used by unknown sources for their personal benefits? We don’t care who is using our personal information until it costs us financially or by any other way. But even if we want to protect our information and want to keep the use of the information for some limited purpose, you really can’t do so as no such feature provided by any online portal. These online sites are selling user data for financial gains. But who is buying your data and why? According to mashable.com - Entities such as airlines, politicians, and even non-profits can use your data for finding new customers or targeting products to existing ones. Financial services companies such as banks and lenders are also using the same datamining services for marketing purposes and to make lending decisions. For instance, certain types of credit products, which fit your personality, could be marketed specifically to you.
But what if you want to restrict the use of personal data and don’t want these Entities, Financial services companies to use your data. What if you want to keep your information available online for a limited period? What if you want to mention that your picture or any data should be used for only ABC purpose and not for ZYX purpose? What if you want to have full control over your own data? Well, by law your personal data is protected but its very long process. First, you should know who is using your data then you need to file a case and need to prove that without your permission they used your data. Many times, due to the time limit we don’t take any action.
Covalent is a Smart Policy Platform, it is a new addition to the Internet protocol suite that specifies and enforces how data should be used. Under the Covalent protocol, data carries a "smart policy" which is specified in programming language and is enforceable by code. So, using Covalent’s smart policy feature, you can proactively specify how and who should use your personal information. You can create a policy if you want your credit card number may only be used once for a one-time charge. And the card related data should be erased from the server after the payment is completed. User can mention that your CT Scan may be processed by an aggregate function and not rendered individually. You can even mention that these text messages can only be viewed after tonight. There are many sets of policies you can mention proactively and protect your data from being misused.
Covalent uses hardware and software approach to enforce such policies defined by users.
"Hardware" refers to the lower layer of "Trusted Execution Environments (TEE)". We first incentivize the creation of a network of TEE nodes which provides us with a scalable amount of "trusted" computing power. Having this "trusted" computing power allows us to make the important assumption about the program behavior of important "supervisor" programs.
"Software" refers to the upper layer of a Policy Specification Language (PSL) that specifies data usage policies in programming language and a Policy Enforcement Framework (PEF) that enforces the PSL through code. A reductive demo of the PSL + PEF setup is the implementation of usage policies commonly used in AI.
People were waiting for a tool where they can create own policies and define the use of their data, if COVA team manages to deliver such platform then it will be huge relife for all internet, social media users.
COVA team is looking for hackers and coders if you are interested in joining COVA team you apply by sending email to career@covalent.ai. But before applying you must meet the following criteria mentioned at http://www.covalent.ai/career.html
• You have been coding since middle school. You spent more time hacking games than playing them.
• You competed in coding competition and won awards on the national level.
• You graduated from a top university and have over 3 years of engineering experience at a top technology firm
For more information about COVA project, visit their official channel
Website: http://www.covalent.ai
Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken
Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/
Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki