COVA: Taking Back Control of Your Own Data

What if I could show you a list of every single place on the internet that held any data related to you?
Picture what this would look like for a second, think of every possible place you’ve entered your name, your date of birth, your address, your email address, shared any pictures or documents. Now imagine that any of these places may well of shared the data you shared with them, with other companies. It’s easy to imagine an ever growing, ridiculously large list. Seriously, when you stop to think about it, it’s just outright scary. The data you send is simply uncontrolled, many can technically access this data, whether legally or illegally.
In a digital age with more and more cyber crime taking place, we have to get smarter and more protective about giving out our data.

Introducing Smart Data

Smart Data is more than just bytes of data stored on some hard drive, it has principles, permissions and policies. To help understand it, I will provide some scenarios that could be used in your every day life;

Smart Credit/Debit Card input that can only be used once on a transaction before self-destructing its details.

Smart Photos or Text Messages that you can set an expiration date of when it can be viewed until.
Smart Scans like CT Scans that could be used for medical and training purposes but removes all private details.
One company utilising this kind of approach would be SnapChat where you send your pictures and specify a time it can be viewed too and then it’s theoretically removed from SnapChat’s centralised server.

How will Covalent achieve this?

The first thing you will notice is that you would no longer go to https:// but instead you would head on over to Cova:// followed by your website address. By doing this you would put control over to the data owners.

To achieve this, the Cova team are utilising 3 core components;

Centrifuge – This is Cova’s programming language which writes the data policies.
CovaVM and Tee – This is Cova’s execution environment which enforces what is written to it by Centrifuge.

Terms of Usage

I’m not just talking about when you hit ‘I agree’ on websites for their consent forms or basic login agreements. Who really knows if what you agree to on these internet sites are actually taken out by the site. With Cova, it allows you to attach a policy to your data and thus means Cova makes sure the policy you set is enforced.

Summary

Founder of Covalent, Vincent Li, is confident that the smart data will be enforceable by Cova and that there is no way it can break. Imagine being able to control your data and have the peace of mind that it is executed and destructed as per your instructions, that’s pretty cool and if achieved would literally benefit every internet user who has or will ever share data.
The team behind Covalent are made up of super smart developers who were regarded to be amongst the best, Vincent himself hails from Harvard. He’s stated in a YouTube interview with Crypto Love that these developers could be earning very large sums working for the likes of Google but have been attracted to Cova because of the interest and being a part of a project that could literally be revolutionary.
What’s really pleasing to see as well is they’re doing Hackathons and Testnets to see if anyone can break these policies to further improve Cova and they’re offering bounty type rewards for this.

For more information and to stay up-to-date with the COVA project, visit their official channels listed below;

Website: http://www.covalent.ai
Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken
Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/
Github: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki