A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

Details A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

2012-02-21

arxiv.org/abs/1202.4503v1

Computer Science

Computers and Society

Scientific paper

While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers who, as a consequence, have also amassed unprecedented amounts of data about the behaviors and personalities of individuals. Developers, regulators, and consumer advocates have looked to alternative decentralized architectures as the natural response to threats posed by these centralized services. The result has been a great variety of solutions that include personal data stores (PDS), infomediaries, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) systems, and federated and distributed social networks. And yet, for all these efforts, decentralized personal data architectures have seen little adoption. This position paper attempts to account for these failures, challenging the accepted wisdom in the web community on the feasibility and desirability of these approaches. We start with a historical discussion of the development of various categories of decentralized personal data architectures. Then we survey the main ideas to illustrate the common themes among these efforts. We tease apart the design characteristics of these systems from the social values that they (are intended to) promote. We use this understanding to point out numerous drawbacks of the decentralization paradigm, some inherent and others incidental. We end with recommendations for designers of these systems for working towards goals that are achievable, but perhaps more limited in scope and ambition.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-422360