Today’s show zeroes in on the most foundational question facing us all, not only in financial innovation but in our whole new world of ubiquitous data. That challenge is, how can we gain the benefits of this huge new universe of digital information, and at the same time, prevent it from hurting us. My very thoughtful guest on this dilemma is Vinny Lingham, CEO of Civic Technologies.

Vinny’s story is fascinating. A star on Shark Tank South Africa, he immigrated from that country to Silicon Valley about a decade ago. In the US he founded and built successful startups in the payments space, and then launched Civic to develop blockchain solutions for the burgeoning problem of online identity fraud. That effort brought him to focus on new technologies for identity verification, such as zero-knowledge proof. It also brought him to a philosophy about identity and personal data, which is that we need a decentralized system in which our data is controlled not by governments or companies, but by us.