Amid the ongoing debate among global leaders about how to strike a balance between protecting citizens from fraud, exploitation and cyberattacks on government infrastructure and protecting individuals’ right to privacy, Nym CEO Harry Halpin believes There must be a balance between data protection, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. Highlights that some politicians stand in the way of innovation.
“At the end of the day, to be quite honest, the regulatory environment is often run by a gerontocracy of people who really don’t know technology very well,” Halpin said.
Halpin highlighted recent efforts in the United Kingdom to require companies to build a “backdoor” into their encryption technologies under the guise of protecting minors from online predators, calling it dangerous.
On Tuesday, British officials asked Meta not to introduce end-to-end encryption without “security measures to protect children from sexual abuse,” a Reuters report said, after the British Parliament passed the Online Security Act bill.
While British politicians said the law would protect minors online, nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said the online safety law would lead to “a much brighter internet” that is censored and restricted for British users and would empower the government not to undermine privacy just in the UK, but also for internet users around the world.
“The real danger is that they will harm their own country by pushing seemingly simple solutions like backdoors or lack of privacy,” Halpin said Decipher In an interview on Messari Mainnet, he added that the illegality of encryption will cause people and organizations that rely on encryption to leave the country.
“It is important to remember that privacy and compliance are something that can be achieved together,” Halpin said.
Founded in 2019, Switzerland-based Nym Technologies launched its privacy-focused decentralized identity platform Nym on the Cosmos blockchain in 2020. As Halpin explained, Nym’s idea arose from the outrage of the European Commission and the European Union over NSA surveillance following the revelations of famous whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In 2021, activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning joined Nym as a security consultant to help develop Nym’s privacy technology, which currently consists of over 600 nodes.
“We believe that most regulators will eventually understand that they need to support privacy-enhancing technologies to ensure both the safety of their citizens and the cybersecurity and national security of their country,” Halpin said.
He added that privacy is crucial to cryptocurrencies entering the mainstream, having “traditional” financial use cases and defending human rights. Looking to the future, Halpin envisioned a new era of privacy once policymakers understood the need.
“There is a whole generation of privacy-enhanced applications that can be built,” Halpin said. “It will take some time for the government to understand this,” Halpin said.
