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!
That cash is analogous to UYC is a beautiful irony that is fundamentally true. I believe the harm caused by collecting, storing, and processing personal data has already equaled the perceived harm of refusing to do so. What we need now is a reasonable methodology in software engineering — a realization by every developer that unnecessary personal data is just digital waste that degrades infrastructure through its compounding weight, stored simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.” We must design our systems to be selective and, just like in the physical world, always give users the choice to either share data or use the service without registration. Cheers!