Decentralized Architectures
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PERSONAL DATA JOURNAL Issue Nº3 April, 2012 Personal Data in Decentralized Network Architectures by Markus Sabadello, Technical Editor One of the most fundamental challenges for the PDE to consider will be the design and deployment of suitable underlying architectures for realizing emerging visions around the management and use of personal data. The basic organizational structures, according to which participants of an ecosystem exchange information with each other, influence many of its fundamental properties, such as privacy, security, flexibility, discovery, or the dependencies between different actors. The possible types of architectural Centralized Architectures patterns that can be implemented are highly diverse, with Centralized architectures are based on the idea that all centralized structures on one end of the spectrum, and fully communication passes through a single point in the system, distributed systems on the other end. On the Internet, very which is responsible for managing the flow of information different forms have always existed, depending on the between participants, for coordinating their behavior, and for infrastructural layer and the concrete applications and services one looks at. Contents Such organizational structures can be described and Feature Article: Personal Data in Decentralized Network analyzed using terminology and methods from the Architechures , Page 1 mathematical field of graph theory. They are really trans- disciplinary concepts, which have been applied to many Industry News: Page 3 practical situations and academic theories both in the natural Events: Page 6-7 and social sciences. One often-cited book in this context is Standards: Page 8-9 “Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization” by Walter W. Powell (1990), which argues that Startup Circle: Page 10 with the advent of modern communication technologies, Resources: Page 11-12 decentralized networks have become an increasingly important concept in various disciplines. Today, they are Special Report: US Privacy Initiatives, Page 13 used not only to describe certain electronic communication Book Reviews: “The Daily You” and “Consent of the systems, but also the structures of corporations, international Networked,” Page 14-15 relations, terrorist organizations, revolutionary movements, Opinions: Sara Wedeman and Tony Fish, Page 16-17 and civil society. Publisher’s Note: ”Catalyzing the Ecosystem,” by Kaliya Hamlin, Page 22 Editorial: “US and EU: A Tale of Two Cities,” by Kelly Mackin, Page 27 Page 1 Personal Data Journal Issue N°3 April 2012 Personal Data Journal introducing hierarchies. This approach has the advantages of decentralized being efficient, well organized, reliable, and secure, as long architectures – is now Personal Data Journal is as all key components of the hierarchy function correctly. more popular than published by the Personal Data ever before, and Ecosystem Consortium. Our goal visions as well as In practice, this means that these systems make use of central is to create and support a diverse hubs or servers, which transmit, control, and organize all concrete projects to community of companies, small information and all communication within the system. Such enable personal data designs are known as client-server architectures, or more storage and and large around the world recently described with marketing terms such as “software as communication in building a thriving personal data a service” or “cloud computing”. Today, many of the most decentralized network ecosystem. widely used Internet services such as Google Search, Gmail, architectures are on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are based on this design, the rise. Personal Data Journal Staff involving a powerful server structure at the center of the Publisher: Kaliya Hamlin architecture, and large numbers of clients on the periphery Decentralized Associate Publisher: which depend on instructions and information from the Architectures Patrick Reilly servers. Alternatives to Editor: Kelly Mackin centralized forms of The implication of such centralized systems is that the Technical Editor: Markus organization are political or corporate entity offering a service is in full commonly referred to Sabadello control of all personal data and communication processes by the terms Researcher: Joseph Boyle which take place, and as a result, there is an inherent “decentralized”, potential for abusing this control and for violating the privacy “distributed” or “peer- of participants. Concrete abuse scenarios and harmful to-peer”, and they Sales consequences include the excessive storage, analysis, provide aggregation, manipulation, and monetization of personal Patrick Reilly [email protected] communication data, as well as the surveillance and manipulation of structures that are less people’s messages as they are exchanged via a network. And or not at all dependent Subscriptions: besides general privacy issues, which are shared by large on any single central Enterprise licenses for Personal numbers of users, concerns have also clearly increased as a point in the system. consequence of political events such as the Iran Green Data Journal are available at Therefore, there is an Revolution, the Arab Spring, Tea Party or the Occupy http://www.pde.cc/journal for inherent potential to Movements, where activists often found their online $3,000 - $10,000 depending the give individual communication to be monitored, censored, and used against organization’s size. participants more them by established political authorities. control, privacy and Personal Data Journal is As a consequence of strong tendencies toward more independence. Some published by Personal Data centralized and strictly hierarchical designs of online approaches exhibit applications and services, criticism has become widespread. certain hierarchical Ecosystem Consortium With growing public awareness about the deficiencies of features (e.g. a non-profit 501(c)6 trade highly centralized systems, the search for alternatives has “federations” that still association. also intensified, and various countertrends have emerged. To distinguish between some extent, tools such as Encrypt Facebook or CrypTweet clients and servers), Executive Director: can be used to achieve more privacy; however, they are whereas others are Kaliya Hamlin really just workarounds. The real alternative – i.e. adopting completely distributed and do not distinguish Board Members: between Clay Shirky different Phillip J. Windley, Ph.D. Internet Identity Workshop #14 participants in any way. Tony Fish May 1-3, 2012 Mountain View, CA Aldo Castaneda www.internetidentityworkshop.com/ If you want to be on the ground floor of making the new personal http://personaldataecosystem.org data ecosystem move from vision to reality. This is the place to be. Page 2 Personal Data Journal Issue N°3 April 2012 Decentralized networks offer greater resilience against file sharing, for example encrypted messaging and disruptions and they are effective in repairing topological newsfeeds. damages due to redundant and re-adjustable connections between participants. Their ability to easily add and remove SocialSwarm sees itself not as a software project, but as an new connections enables them to recruit and integrate new advocacy group that can act as a mediator between different members into the network at any time, or to even join initiatives. separate networks together. Yet another strength of such Unhosted attempts to decouple applications from data networks is their ability to transmit and process messages in a storage by providing an abstract “remoteStorage” API, very efficient way, bypassing hierarchies that may cause therefore giving individuals choice and eliminating the need obstruction and delays, and getting information directly to for being dependent on any single part of a system. the participants that need it. Connections between participants can be dynamically optimized, and resources or SecuShare provides social networking that is completely communication channels that are found to be valuable can independent of servers and instead relies on client software immediately be used again. communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion. It implements a “social onion routing” protocol that utilizes one’s social One of the ideas that is currently receiving a lot of attention graph for routing purposes and for calculating trust. is to build a decentralized social networking service, i.e. a “Facebook without a single Facebook”, or in other words, an Thimbl uses the Finger technology from the early days of the infrastructure similar to E-Mail, where multiple service Internet to enable decentralized microblogging, and it makes providers and users can interact with each other and fulfill a strong political statement by describing capitalism as the their social communication needs, without being dependent reason why today there is too much centralization online. on any single company or server system. Based on this idea, the Federated Social Web effort has emerged, which operates Crabgrass provides tools for organizing and collaborating in as a W3C Community Group and has so far held two democratic ways. However, it does not view itself as a summits in Portland, Oregon, and Berlin, Germany. A web traditional social network. It focuses on group collaboration comic exists that explains the idea in simple terms, rather than a hierarchic, ego-centric approach.Briar seeks to conferences dedicated to decentralized architectures such as develop a secure communications network for civil society