If you’ve seen The Social Dilemma, you know all too well that today, people are being turned into products. Everything we do online – all of the data we upload and all of our digital activities – is tracked and oftentimes used against us. Targeted advertising is just the beginning.

Personal data is used by algorithms to make incredible important decisions, like whether someone should receive financial or health support or benefits. In China, people are now even receiving “scores” for their behaviors. It sounds like Black Mirror, but it’s real life.

That’s the scary part. The good news is that things don’t have to be this way. ThreeFold is building the engine for an Internet where people can finally be autonomous with their data.

With today’s Internet, infrastructure is centralized. Companies provide services in exchange for your personal data, which is stored on servers in hyper-scale data centers owned by private companies.

In ThreeFold’s model, those servers are called 3Nodes, and rather than sitting inside centralized data centers, they sit inside the homes or offices (or small data centers) owned by independent people and organizations called Farmers. But the data inside is owned by the person or persons who put it there. They maintain access right as well. From a technical standpoint, data is dispersed across 3Nodes by an algorithm that makes it such that nobody can access it. In addition, connections are peer-to-peer, meaning data goes directly between sender and recipient rather than passing through intermediaries as it does today – bringing further levels of security.

Thus, people can finally have data autonomy, knowing their data is safe, and truly theirs.