Does the thought of auto-uploading all your mobile camera photos to Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) or Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) make you slightly queasy? Though millions of people do this, they do it without knowing how private or secure their data is. Thanks to tokenization and a fast, scalable blockchain, there’s a better option. 4EVERLY has built a simple interface to do this, one that stores images on-chain, permanently. Better still, there are no monthly or annual subscription fees.
In addition to the privacy angle, there are also concerns about who actually owns data stored on centralized servers in corporate data centers. Ostensibly, the data belongs to the users. However, this is never 100% guaranteed, and it’s difficult to enforce. On-chain tokenization of data means only the person who put it there can own, access, or control it.
4EVERLY is very simple to use. You take a photo, and it creates a 1Sat Ordinal token of the image, which is permanent. No data center can accidentally delete it, you won’t lose valuable content over a banned account, and it’s private by design. End-to-end encryption makes photos accessible only to the users who uploaded them. Users retain full ownership of all content, which is also a built-in blockchain benefit.
“As privacy concerns continue to grow, more users are seeking alternatives to traditional cloud storage. Blockchain technology offers a promising solution that puts control back in the hands of photo owners,” 4EVERLY’s website reads.
“While ‘free’ storage might save money today, the long-term cost to your privacy could be substantial. Consider investing in secure, blockchain-based alternatives that prioritize your ownership and privacy rights.”
How 4EVERLY works
There are costs involved with all this, though over time it’s still cheaper than paying for cloud storage subscriptions, and there aren’t any limits to the number of images you could upload. 4EVERLY grants you 10 free tokens for signing up. From there, it’s $10 for 1,000 more image uploads, $25 for 3,125 images, $50 for 7,500, and $100 for 20,000.
4EVERLY, at present, doesn’t have any features apart from these basics. There’s no social or sharing aspect. You’re also only able to upload photos you take with the mobile (web) app’s camera—i.e., no uploading past photos from folders or galleries. Developer Dan Wagner told CoinGeek the upload feature is “definitely something that should be added,” and hopefully it is at some point.
One other thing to consider is that when we say on-chain tokenization is permanent and immutable, that’s exactly what it means. 4EVERLY will allow you to remove images that appear in the app itself, but once they’re a token, they exist on the blockchain forever. That said, only the original uploader would have the data to access that image. And 4EVERLY itself won’t harvest your data since it can’t see it.
The problem with storing images on centralized servers
There are many cloud backup services available these days for photos. The main ones that spring to mind are Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud, as mentioned above, but other cloud storage services like Dropbox, pCloud, and OneDrive are also keen to store your camera roll. In fact, the average mobile device user receives multiple prompts to do this, and they can be persistent, even if you’ve said “no, thank you” in the past.
Why do they try so hard to provide this service? For one, photos and videos take up a lot of storage space, meaning you’ll hit your free account limits pretty quickly and need to sign up for extended disk space for a subscription fee. Another, more sinister-sounding, reason is that these services could potentially be harvesting your data behind the scenes. Facial recognition and metadata can be analyzed, cross-referenced, and saved for later, even if no actual human ever accesses the data.
These large corporate cloud storage services all have privacy policies, but trusting these policies to protect you is a leap of faith. They’re also “updated” occasionally, presenting users with a wall of text and an “agree” button, which is the only option to continue using the service. We wouldn’t want to outright accuse cloud storage services of outright abusing their positions of power by analyzing and harvesting data, but these days, there are many reasons not to assume your online data is as private as you’d like.
Blockchain, to use a cliche, provides a solution to this. More specifically, it’s the BSV blockchain with unbounded scaling, fast processing time, and minuscule fees. 4EVERLY and 1Sat Ordinals store images on-chain via ordfs.network, encrypted with AES-256 and keys derived from SHA256 (mnemonic phrase and derivation path). Each uploaded photo has its own unique key.
Using the mnemonic (the usual 12-word phrase familiar to digital wallet owners), users can restore access to images even if 4EVERLY itself ever shuts down—there’s a recovery tool available on ordfs.network, and 4EVERLY gives you the URL for this, should you need it in the future.
Centralized cloud data storage may seem cheap and easy to use, but at the end of the day, you’re trusting precious memories to services that have done little to earn that trust, and don’t provide any lasting guarantees. A far better option exists, and it’s more affordable. If services like 4EVERLY can match cloud services with more sophisticated feature sets, it and other blockchain-based services could (and should) become the data storage option of choice.
Watch: Blockchain is much more than digital assets
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