A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

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

An approach to decentralizing search, using stigmergic hyperlinks

A stigmergic hyperlink, or “stigh”, is an object that looks and behaves like a regular HTML hyperlink, but runs at the server side. A system of stighs displays interesting emergent behaviors, of some complexity, but a stigh alone is very simple: it has a life attribute, only reinforced when users click it, and methods to provide meta-information about its destination. We reason that stigmergic hyperlinks could support a more decentralized approach to the Web search problem, particularly for addressing the “Deep Web”, which we consider all the WWW that is uncharted by search engines. We discuss vertical and horizontal solutions for the “Deep Web” and present a specialized system that makes searchable the publications hiding at the biggest Portuguese digital magazines site. The index that the system builds, feeds the search related methods of a stigmergic hyperlink linking to that destination. Our contributions are, to make the case for a broader “Deep Web” concept, that goes beyond databases hiding behind HTML forms; describe an approach that could decentralized Web search, based on stigmergic hyperlinks and a supporting business model; and to exemplify one specialized system that enables searching the biggest Portuguese digital magazines website