Reports of Privacy’s Death Have Been Greatly Monetized

By Katalin K. Bartfai-Walcott, CTO - Synovient

Every few weeks, someone announces the death of privacy as if they’ve just discovered gravity. The argument is always the same: AI needs data, data needs access, and access means surveillance. Users, we’re told, must hand over their personal information to enjoy the “convenience” of AI services, ideally while paying for the privilege of being monetized. It’s all presented as pragmatic, inevitable, and vaguely benevolent.

But the logic rests on an outdated assumption: that data is something humans give away instead of something they own.

The truth is less dramatic and far more inconvenient. Privacy isn’t dying because of technology; it’s dying because of architecture. We built the foundations of the internet on design choices from the 1960s and 70s, when storage was expensive, compute was scarce. Nobody imagined their refrigerator would someday report their habits to an ad network. Sure, we can grumble about Tim Berners-Lee or the folks at DARPA, but they were building for science, not surveillance capitalism.

And the good news? Architecture can be redesigned. It just requires admitting that the blueprints we’ve been using were drafted for a different century.

From Files to Assets

Our entire digital infrastructure still runs on the quaint metaphor that data is a file; a neat little object that sits quietly on a disk until someone drags it somewhere else. That metaphor worked fine back when information lived in beige boxes under our desks, but AI has taken a sledgehammer to it.

Data no longer stays put. It moves, merges, and multiplies like it’s been mainlining caffeine. It infers, recombines, and regenerates itself faster than we can draft a new privacy policy. Trying to protect privacy by “controlling the copies” is like trying to contain smoke by sealing the room and holding your breath. The wall model didn’t just fail; it collapsed decades ago.

The answer isn’t higher walls or stricter forms. It’s to reimagine what data can do for itself. When data becomes a self-governed asset, able to declare its own origin, assert its own terms, and check who’s poking at it, privacy stops being a delicate social contract and becomes a built-in technical feature.

We already solved this for money. A digital dollar doesn’t forget who it is when you move it between banks. It carries its identity, denomination, and legitimacy everywhere it goes. There’s no reason data shouldn’t behave the same way. A photo, a record, or a model input should know who owns it, where it came from, and what it’s allowed to do.

Once privacy becomes an intrinsic property rather than an external promise, data doesn’t need to hide to survive. It can move freely, act intelligently, and remain sovereign. Imagine that.

Agency, Not Access

The high priests of data fatalism insist that intelligence requires the free flow of unregulated data; that superintelligence will shrivel and die without unrestrained surveillance. But AI doesn’t need uncontrolled data; it needs credible data.

Garbage in, hallucinations out. That’s not just a meme; it’s a law of nature. Data gathered without consent, context, or accuracy only teaches AI to repeat human errors faster and louder. Meanwhile, permissioned and provenance-verified data produces something far more valuable: accountability.

When data carries its own governance, both individuals and institutions gain something they’ve never truly possessed online: agency.

For individuals, this means their data can participate in digital life without being stripped apart. Imagine your health information contributing to research on your terms, compensating you for its use, and pulling itself back when those terms expire. That’s not utopian — it’s overdue.

For enterprises, self-governing data becomes a new kind of trust engine. Companies can share information across ecosystems without surrendering control or gambling on compliance. Each data object becomes its own compliance officer, quietly verifying and revoking as needed. Privacy, suddenly, isn’t a liability — it’s a differentiator.

In this world, privacy and productivity stop being opposites. They become co-dependencies in the same architecture. Efficiency with ethics. Scale with accountability. Who knew?

The Architecture of Trust

Privacy has always evolved alongside the medium that carries it. In the physical world, it meant a locked door. In the early digital era, it meant passwords and encryption. In the age of AI, it means representation; data that can speak for itself, with embedded intent and enforceable boundaries.

The shift from “don’t collect” to “don’t abuse” sounds nice, but it only works if data can detect the abuse on its own. Otherwise, we’re just posting polite signs that say “please don’t steal” in front of open vaults. Privacy can’t rely on goodwill, regulation, or quarterly ethics statements. It has to be instrumented.

Privacy expressed as code, enforced at the data layer, and verifiable in real time; that’s the frontier. When data can recognize who’s accessing it, why they’re doing so, and whether they have the right to do so, privacy becomes enforceable by design.

The real problem isn’t that privacy slows progress. It’s that progress has outgrown the scaffolding it was built on. The next era of technology won’t be defined by how much data we can collect, but by how responsibly that data can act.

When privacy is built into the architecture, we move from ownership to stewardship. Data stops being something we hoard and starts being something we respect. The companies that understand this won’t be slower; they’ll be the ones left standing when trust becomes the new currency.

Closing Reflection

Privacy doesn’t have to die. It just needs a better career path. It has to evolve; beyond the file, beyond the firewall, beyond the checkbox. It must become living, self-governing, and enforceable.

When that happens, privacy will no longer be an act of restraint. It will be an act of design. And in that design, we’ll finally prove that technology can serve the people who built it, without pretending that “terms of service” count as consent. 

At Synovient, we’ve built the architecture that makes this vision practical. Our Digital Agency Capsule (DAC) transforms data from a passive file into an active, self-governing asset. Each DAC carries its own terms, provenance, and permissions, enforced cryptographically rather than contractually. That means privacy, consent, and control travel with the data itself, wherever it goes. Instead of relying on platforms to behave, the DAC ensures that data can speak for its owner, verify authorized use, and deny access when it isn’t. It’s not a new layer of compliance; it’s a new foundation for digital sovereignty, where privacy isn’t promised, it’s already engineered into the data.