You might have seen the video of Pablo Gaiger signing into Pillar Wallet using his Facebook profile yesterday. Yes, your suspicion is correct.
It was an April’s Fools joke!
Congratulations, if you caught it. If you didn’t, here’s what you should know.
Pillar Project was created to take back control of our personal data and will never change its mission.
Providing a way for Facebook to track your in-wallet activity would be an extreme violation of our principles. The Pillar Wallet is “engineered for privacy” and was designed to prevent exactly this. We want users to own their identity and personal information directly, not facilitate the use of existing social networks that have shown cannot be trusted to safeguard user privacy.
Vitor Py, our CTO discusses this in more specific detail in his recent article — it’s a three-minute read that will help you understand the engineering and design approach we have taken to reduce data correlation across the Pillar network social graph. Expect more articles from this series as the platform evolves.
Pillar — Engineered for privacy: Connections
Now for the few of you, that saw the opposite approach; a way to login to Facebook using the Pillar Wallet, you are on the right track! 👍
This is actually the approach that we believe existing and future social platforms need to enable. A way for a user to interact with and benefit from their network, but where the user retains control over the content and information they share. Unfortunately, that possibility inevitably lies with Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the other centralized network owners. And considering the profits made from data harvesting and profiling users’ habits, I doubt its anything that they want to relinquish any time soon.
In terms of functionality, we are already working on it. We are implementing WalletConnect into our platform, which will allow users to easily sign into decentralized apps and services directly from their Pillar Wallet.
The first example of a third party service login, achieved via Oauth, is already deployed live. You can try it out yourself by logging in to our Pillar Forum from your wallet. And check Pablo’s video to understand better how it all fits into our vision of the Personal Data Locker.
We may have pulled a fast one on you, but it was in the interest of conveying an important message: we need to unite together and take back control of our personal information and privacy.
In Drew Harding’s own words:
Decentralization is more than a buzzword to sell tokens. It’s a cultural movement to change existing power structures. A realignment of incentives to reprioritize individual privacy over corporate profits. Pillar is building a powerful tool to support this movement, however, it’s up to consumers to understand the value of their personal data and demand direct control.