Very good piece from Stanford Law on technology. Below intro and beyond.
From: The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
PRIVACY, MIDDLEWARE, AND INTEROPERABILITY: CAN TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS, INCLUDING BLOCKCHAIN, HELP US AVOID HARD TRADEOFFS?
By Daphne Keller on August 23, 2021 at 7:01 am
Interoperability and distributed content moderation models have tremendous promise. They could temper major platforms’ power over public discourse, introducing both more economic competition and more diverse and pluralistic spaces for online speech. But these models -- which I will reductively refer to as “middleware,” following Francis Fukuyama’s coinage -- also raise a number of as-yet-unresolved problems. As I explained in this short piece, one of the hardest problems involves privacy: When a user opts in to a new service, can she give that service permission to process other people’s data and content?
This post examines some possible technical solutions to protect privacy while enabling interoperability or distributed content moderation. It focuses in part on blockchain technologies, and draws on recent conversations with a number of seriously smart people about possible technical designs. My takeaway is that there is no magic bullet. We can’t have perfect privacy and optimize for platform interoperability or middleware. But blockchain technologies, and some other technical design approaches, can whittle away at the problem. The rest of this post examines ways to do that.
Note: This post starts from a pretty high level of wonkiness, and then gets wonkier. If you’re new to the “middleware” topic, my short take on why it matters and why it’s hard are here; Cory Doctorow and I also had a great live discussion about it here. If you’re a blockchain maven and spot any mistakes, they are definitely mine and not the fault of the experts I talked to.
This post doesn’t run down every possible permutation of the ideas it discusses, and it is un-wonkily reductive about at least three complicated things. (1) It uses the term “middleware” very loosely, as a way to lump together models including platform-to-platform interoperability, protocols not platforms, Magic APIs, and federated systems like Mastodon. (2) It elides differences between real blockchain technologies, describing a hypothetical a version (perhaps most similar to Project Liberty) optimized for Middleware. (3) It simplifies the kinds of user data and content used by social networks.
OK, here we go.
What Blockchain Can Do
As a social media user, blockchain technologies could provide me with the following:
1. An authenticatable identity that I control and can use to log in or validate my identity across multiple services.
2. A social graph linking my identity to other people’s similarly authenticated identities (meaning I control a “contact list” and decide when and how other people or services can access it).
3. For purposes of Middleware, a copy of every piece of content I post. This doesn’t have to be blockchain-linked -- it could just be stored on a physical device I control. But the content could be stored subject to my control as the blockchain-authenticated user, or in principle even stored on-chain (though then it couldn’t be deleted). To be useful for Middleware, this content would need to be kept in a format usable by any platform or Middleware provider. (This is quite hard to do, in practice). For each item of content, it could include a record of which service I shared it with and which contacts from my social graph could see it on that service.
The Problem with Sharing Other People’s Data
Suppose three friends -- Ann, Balaji, and Carlos -- all have the set-up described above. Each has a blockchain-linked identity, a blockchain-linked social graph listing one another as contacts, and a controlled copy of all their posted content. They are currently friends on Facebook. .... '