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In the era of Big Data and AI, what are the roles of Internet concepts and decentralized data storage? The tensions and contradictions of these parallel developments were exposed at SXSW in a compelling presentation entitled "Designing for the Next 30 Years of the Web", by Justin Bingham (CTO of Janeiro Digital) and John Bruce (Cofounder and CEO of Inrupt) . They presented a whole new way of storing data, breaking with the current paradigm of confidentiality, and their approach deserves to be examined outside of a single technology conference.
Decentralize the web
Data is at the heart of the internet. However, with the evolution of the Internet, the way in which data is exchanged has changed dramatically compared to the intentions of one of its creators, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who had imagined an Internet where the exchange of information did not include the transfer of actual data to the requester. Party. Instead, he thought the data would only exist with his owner and that the Internet would consist of links to these resources for reading and writing purposes.
That's why Berners-Lee launched the Solid project, which sets standards for a decentralized Internet. Personal data is kept by the individual user and not centralized with each service provider.
Late last year, Inrupt's open source startup developed a Solid Standards-based application that enables more peer-to-peer Internet access with personal pods for everyone. The Solid network is entirely conceptualized around these pods that contain all the data of a person, whether it is your bank account or your latest publications on social networks. In this case, your data is entirely owned by you. Inrupt and Solid Community members provide pods that run on their respective servers, but you can also create your own pod on your own server for optimal privacy. There is no central owner of these pods as this would undermine Solid's principle.
One integration
With Pods, all services, from your preferred taxi company to your insurance company, would communicate via an API with your personal data, each having separate access to read and write to different parts of these data while reading and writing simultaneously. To answer that, Inrupt started working with Janeiro Digital to create an open standard with which all applications can work. The advantage of this is that applications need only learn a single standard and integrate with the pod to provide a data-driven service. Integrations between different services are no longer necessary.
Imagine that you are writing an application that could combine and display messages from different social networks; it would be necessary to recover the data of each one of them. Instead, if each of these social networks stored their publications in the Pod, this new application could simply be granted access to all publications by its owner, which would reduce the number of integrations to only one. In addition, if this new application wants to combine publications with other personal data, it could easily retrieve this information in your pod.
Big data and AI
How would big data, machine learning and AI work in such a pod-based world? All of these concepts are largely based on centralized storage, and pods are anything but that; especially when pods are hosted around the world, with no guarantee of network availability.
If the data can not be accumulated and must be extracted and interpreted on millions of pods, how would it be possible to perform machine learning without significant loss of performance? And even if the data could be replicated and combined with more data, would that not contradict the very idea of Solid in the first place? And even if it is feasible, although temporarily, could not users simply set their preferences so that their data can not be used for data mining?
The big players
Companies that manage much of the current centralized Internet are the ones that depend the most on the possession of our data. Most of their turnover, which generates their shareholder value, is based on the data they collect from us. data that they will never give up voluntarily for the greater good. These companies will not adopt initiatives such as Solid.
For their part, Bruce and Bingham also explained how pods can bring new benefits to businesses and customers by providing instant access to more data. An example is the combination of portable data with that of an insurance policy, where the step counter of your smartwatch could create a lower premium. (Of course, this is a simplistic example, because in reality, the user should also agree to share other data, such as purchased food products, which could then increase the premium.), it is likely that companies will use pods to exchange permissions, where some services will only be available if certain permissions are given. It's up to you to decide if the benefit is worth it. But how fragile will this freedom of choice be in basic services such as health care?
Catch up
Solid's beauty lies in its simplicity, which shows that it is not compatible with current and complex web site structures and their profit-driven data collection model. The Internet has become extremely vast and consists of many established platforms. Trying to change this will take a lot of time, development efforts and especially goodwill. Having a totally new approach that disqualifies all existing applications can only succeed if it can reach a similar size or greater. However, the Solid project is young. I hope it will gain ground. Since the beginning of Inrupt, it has already attracted a lot of attention, so the potential is there.
Sandor Voordes is Technical Director at Dept (Design & Technology Netherlands). A developer in the past, he now works as a technical manager and architect on major digital platforms. Sandor is a strong supporter of an optimal approach, in which solutions are a combination of multiple integrations. Over the last 2 years, he has also been part of the departmental work team in charge of presenting the GDPR and helping the department's clients to comply with the GDPR.
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