Web2 took our data, web3 exposed it, the next internet must give control back to users | Opinion

For most of the internet’s history, we thought we were getting a harmless convenience economy: faster browsing, smarter recommendations, free services subsidised by opaque advertising. What we actually received was a silent shift in power — from users to platforms, from autonomy to extraction, from consent to surveillance disguised as convenience.

The modern internet no longer merely hosts our interactions; it studies us. Every digital gesture, every purchase, scroll, location ping, message, pause, or late-night search feeds a behavioural model we did not meaningfully choose to participate in. Our personal data has become the raw material of a surveillance economy so pervasive that it now knows things about us we would never articulate aloud.

These insights are not trivial. They map political preferences, infer sexual orientation, predict mental-health issues, anticipate relationship tension, and model our impulse triggers with uncanny precision. The largest platforms didn’t become powerful by building better software. They became powerful by building better profiles of us.

And somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing it. The erosion of agency didn’t arrive with a dramatic announcement — it arrived through nudges, permissions, cookies, and defaults that no one really understood, but everyone clicked “accept” on.

Then AI arrived and made the problem dramatically worse.

AI didn’t return control to users — it industrialised intimacy

AI systems promise utility, creativity, and productivity. But behind the friendly chat interfaces lies an extractive logic more sophisticated than anything web2 ever attempted. To “learn,” these models require our prompts, our conversations, our writing patterns, our photos, our emotional signals, our frustrations, our secrets, and our metadata — all of it.

People treat AI systems like private notebooks or digital confidants. They are nothing of the sort. The largest AI companies actively collect, store, analyse, and train on the very material that people assume is transient and confidential.

The implications are profound. For the first time in history, not only corporations but computational systems themselves are learning our behavioural boundaries, vulnerabilities, and preferences. If web2 eroded privacy by hoarding our data, AI erodes it by internalising our inner lives.

The internet is drifting into an era in which machines understand us not because we told them who we are, but because we gave them enough fragments to assemble a version of us more precise than our own self-perception.

Web3 promised sovereignty — then accidentally architected total exposure

Crypto emerged as a philosophical rebellion against this concentration of power. The industry promised us self-sovereignty: ownership of our assets, identity, and data. But in practice, the first generation of web3 systems made a different error. In solving the problem of trust, they engineered radical transparency into everything.

Blockchains turned human behaviour into public ledgers. Wallet flows, transaction histories, social graphs, financial habits — all visible to anyone, forever. This created a paradox: the very technology meant to empower individuals ended up producing a perfect environment for surveillance. Chain analytics companies today can profile users with a granularity that banks, governments, and advertisers could only dream of.

Web2 took our data. Web3 exposed it. Both models sidelined the user’s right to choose. And yet, the solution is not to abandon decentralization — but to redesign it.

The next era of the internet

The core problem uniting web2 and web3 is deceptively simple: users do not control what others can see. There is a shift we must engineer into the foundations of the next internet — and we are building for this shift at TEN Protocol. Instead of selectively encrypting addresses or obfuscating transactions, TEN moves encryption down to the protocol layer. Everything — state, storage, computation, logic, user interactions — is encrypted end-to-end. Not wrapped. Not layered. Built in.

This structural change unlocks a fundamentally different design space:

• Developers cannot extract behavioural data from users.
• Third parties cannot track how, when, or why users interact with apps.
• dApps cannot embed hidden telemetry, analytics, or profiling.
• Users can choose what they want to reveal, and when, and to whom.

We call this smart transparency: privacy as the default state of computation, transparency as a deliberate and user-driven act. In practical terms, this means:

• You can verify eligibility for a service without revealing your identity.
• You can use DeFi without exposing your entire wallet history to the world or risk being the victim of front-running.
• AI agents can operate on-chain without revealing your personal information.
• dApps can verify parameters without over-collecting or storing unnecessary data.

Developers retain full programmability. Users regain agency.

People aren’t trying to hide. They’re trying to choose.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about privacy is that people want to disappear. In reality, most people are perfectly willing to share information — when they understand what they’re sharing, who receives it, and what they get in return.

Privacy is not secrecy. Privacy is the right to self-disclose on your own terms. Web2 removed that right by turning consent into a meaningless click. Web3 removed it by making transparency the default for every action. The next generation of the internet must restore the balance.

The coming decade will be defined by a return to something that should never have been lost: the individual’s control over their own data. We are entering a crucial moment in the evolution of the internet. Artificial intelligence is advancing at an extraordinary speed, blockchain infrastructure is maturing beyond its experimental origins, and our digital identities now shape everything from how we transact to how we are understood.

Yet unless users reclaim agency over their digital footprint, the internet will continue drifting toward a future in which our behaviour is more legible to algorithms than to ourselves. The principle that must guide us forward is strikingly simple. Data belongs to the person who produces it. Transparency should be a voluntary act, not a compulsory condition. Applications should function without prying into the private lives of their users. And privacy should never be a premium feature reserved for the technically literate; it should be the quiet, unremarkable default of the digital world.

If the last decade was defined by platforms absorbing our information, the next will be defined by how resolutely we take it back. The answer is not to urge people to trust new institutions, but to build systems that no longer require trust at all. When privacy is inherent, and transparency is deliberate, users finally — and unequivocally — regain control.

The gap is already visible in the architecture of today’s internet: we ask blockchains to secure value, yet we force users to transact inside glass boxes. No serious financial system, no meaningful coordination layer, can function under that contradiction. The next wave of base and execution layers is emerging precisely to resolve this tension, not by promising secrecy but by engineering choice. If this decade belongs to anything, it is to systems that make privacy the quiet default and expose only what must be seen. When we rebuild the internet on those foundations, user sovereignty stops being an aspiration and becomes the operational norm.