The origin of our name

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis were prominent American lawyers during the late 19th century. Together they wrote “The Right to Privacy,” which appeared in an 1890 issue of Harvard Law Review. The article was a reaction against perceived invasions of social privacy and today is considered one of the most influential essays in the history of American law.

Now in the 21st century, their focus on privacy — and the tension between the breakdown of social privacy and the preservation of individual privacy — is as relevant as ever. The digital information age has brought familiar issues back into the spotlight, now focused on data privacy and information use, rather than solely individuals’ privacy.

Decentralised technologies help to rebalance information asymmetries, restore data privacy and trust, and make possible new approaches to data access and sharing. In other words, they simultaneously re-establish data privacy, while enabling broad, frictionless, need-to-know data access when and where appropriate — with the permission of data owners.

We think Warren and Brandeis would approve.