Darren Steadman

This is a reply to a post a friend made about a new technology he is playing with called FluidDB.

In his article he questions the privacy and data control issues with using such a technology as FluidDB, I found these issues interesting and so have decided to outline how I think they could be addressed. My thoughts do not deal with privacy and data access separately they kind of provide an overall approach that could potentially solve both issues.

From what I have read from both Guys article and some of the documentation on FluidDBs website, the premiss of their technology is that data is described as objects which are public to anyone else using the service, each user can then add tags to this object to extend the information about it or specialise it for a particular purpose. Tags can have various permissions allowing them to be readonly or restricting who can see them etc. All of this data is hosted in the cloud and anyone can access it from anywhere using simple RESTful type access using HTTP (I believe).

Now before I begin I would like to define what I class as “the cloud”. There are lots of different definitions of the cloud out there depending on who you talk to and what they are using it for. Personally I see it as distributed processing and data storage capability that is highly scalable, the most important part though is that you have a single point of interaction with the system and at no time do you know (or care for that matter) where the processing or data storage is. The whole point of the cloud as I see it is you have an application and you want to use that to interact with data of some kind of give a result, where that data is stored and where the processing takes place and more importantly how it is distributed is of no concern to the user, those are details that are taken care of by the cloud, all the user should be bothered about is that data goes in something happens somewhere and an answer comes out.

Using the above definition of “the cloud” I can then continue to define how I think the privacy and data control issues could be resolved.

Instead of having a single datastore, many service providers could provide data stores for you to place your personal FluidDB objects. It could be possible for you to even host your own FluidDB objects so that no company or other individual had access to it. Any FluidDB tags would then be held by the company/individual who was tagging your object and there would be tracker links between the two somewhat in the way bit-torrent works for finding peers. This would allow people to move their data around in anyway they wanted but still keep connections to tags etc. You could imagine that one day everyone would host their personal objects on a mobile permanently connect device such as a smartphone. Your personal object would contain any of the data you did not mind being made public and then various services could add tags to that object that could be marked as private and managed by the individual service you had signed up to. Obviously some of these services could provide public tags that other services could access.

In many ways it would work in a similar fashion to how google wave proposed the distribution of waves between enterprise customers to keep them private and secure while at the same time allowing access to certain outsiders.

This all means that data would be stored in “the cloud” (as defined above) and that anyone would be able to access it from anywhere but at the same time you would have more control over the privacy of your own data and no one entity would have direct control over all of the data.

This has been a very brief overview of a potential way to solve an issue that might not even exist, but sometimes it is fun to have ideas just to spark off some conversation.