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MetaMirror is a new project developed by Auth3 network building on the Oasis Network. It uses the data management and privacy-preserving features of the Parcel ParaTime. Today, they are announcing the launch of MBuddy. MBuddy is the first-ever Web 3.0 identity service that uses your existing social media data to define identity “attributes”. These attributes will become assets to users who can choose to share them with interested data buyers for profit, for the first time ever — in a completely privacy-preserving way.

A giant leap towards a fairer internet

At Oasis Protocol our vision has always been that a better internet is inevitable. An internet that rewards all parties fairly for the roles they play. We laid out a vision for users to monetize their existing internet usage data in our article, “The Billion Dollar Data Opportunity: That pays everyone for using the internet.”. For this reason, we are beyond excited to see MetaMirror launch its groundbreaking MBuddy service.

The MBuddy service enables users to upload their social media data, creating a mirrored digital personality with attributes that become assets and earn income. It is flipping the existing situation on its head. Instead of social media companies exploiting your data, it enables you to claim full ownership of that data and put it to work for you. MetaMirror believes all data can be “Mirrored” into assets but the MBuddy service, is focusing first, on social media data as the most easily available source of data for you to begin to build your digital personality.

MBuddy gives the right to manage data usage, but also the right to extract profit from it. The data asset is stored in Parcel, the Oasis Network’s privacy-preserving blockchain storage and computation infrastructure. Users can manage how their data asset is being used by reviewing the compensation terms of data projects and sharing their data with the projects they choose. Users can also choose to support the science fields of interest, by granting them compute access to their data assets, and become part of human’s data-driven innovations.

The foundation of a fair Metaverse

The mass adoption of NFTs; Facebook, Microsoft, and Nike’s shift to the Metaverse are all symptoms of a new megatrend. A megatrend towards digital economies and digital property existing on par in significance with physical property.

The problem is digital property has never had the same rights as physical property. The technology hasn’t been there to truly demonstrate ownership. As a result, companies have been able to profit off the data their users create. As we move towards a metaverse where increasing importance is placed on digital assets we have the chance to reverse that. By building the blocks that enable users to take back ownership of their data and bring that into the Metaverse.

MetaMirror sees its service as a foundational component of the MetaVerse, the bridge between Web 2.0 data — siloed, exploited, and owned by corporations, vulnerable to attack, and not private — and Web 3.0 data — private, secure, fully owned, and tokenized by the user on the blockchain.

In the past, companies extracted profit through amassing, trading, and computing on sensitive personal data. This is an invasion of the data rights of the people. MetaMirror will change this situation into a personal investment scheme where MBuddy owners extract profit from their own raw data. After reviewing the compensation terms of a data-driven project, MBuddies can choose to opt-in by granting the project a temporary compute right on their social media data. Notice that the compute right is different from reading right and copying right. The computation is conducted in a privacy-preserving way, meaning that your sensitive data isn’t revealed to anyone.

Your data, your NFT

Parcel enables the upload of data into a secure environment, it gives users the ability

• To govern how that data is used — who has access, who can query it, what they can query etc.
• To analyze data privately — Machine learning algorithms can look at the data but it happens in a secure, confidential environment that means data will never be seen by any person, it cannot be downloaded or copied and the data owner will always have full rights over it.
• To audit, every transaction — every usage of your data can be checked during and after the fact.
• To tokenize their data into an NFT — Minting a user’s own data-backed NFT. Whatever data you have stored in Parcel can be turned into an NFT with the contents private until access is granted by the data owner. Even then the owner will have full control over what they reveal, i.e. reveal your social media data but not your credit card transactions to Acme corp data buyer.

MetaMirror’s MBuddy is essentially the first-ever real-world version of a data-backed NFT!

The use cases for this are truly amazing. Here are a few examples of combining Web 3.0 engagement, personal portrait, and social media:

• Privacy-preserving targeted marketing — as we outlined in our previous blog “The Billion Dollar Data Opportunity: That pays everyone for using the internet.”
• Decentralized community management
• Decentralized compensated news propagation
• Audience insights extraction
• Train machine learning models
• Complicated NFT release based on audience data
• Games developed based on player’s personal traits
• On-chain 3D gallery with personalized art piece explanation
• Privacy-preserving recommendation system

If you want to find out more about MetaMirror and the Mbuddy service you can read more on their launch blog here or on the Auth3 website here

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