The day before yesterday, I was chatting with a friend, and he jokingly threw out a question: With so many large models nowadays, who dares to say that they don't contain your and my photos and ramblings?

"Where does the data come from? Web scraping. Did you get consent? No."

It sounds like a joke, but just thinking about it is terrifying. Our daily chat records, short videos, order information—all are being secretly mined, traded, and analyzed. Claiming "anonymous processing"? In the face of enough data dimensions, that's a joke—academic papers have confirmed last year that combining behavioral data with public information to re-identify someone has a much higher success rate than you might think.

This has long gone beyond mere "privacy leaks" and is about your digital identity being commercialized, without your knowledge or rights.

Later, I started to think: what if the data itself carried a "privacy clause" during flow? For example, you agree to use your medical data for AI model training but require that it cannot be traced back to your identity; or you upload original designs, allowing limited calls, but each time leaving a record on the chain—that's true data sovereignty.

This idea made me interested in the Walrus protocol. Unlike traditional cloud storage that only stores data without regard for subsequent use, it embeds a programmable privacy framework at the storage layer. You can upload a large AI training set and directly configure: which parts are publicly verifiable, which must be encrypted and sealed, and under what conditions certain identities can access it. These rules are automatically executed by smart contracts, not manual approval—truly giving users control over how their data is used.