Personal Containers is a research programme solving the impediments towards gaining control of our personal data, both about us and by us, over our lifetimes.
A complete solution will entail solving a wide range of challenges, from social to economic to policy, in addition to the technical. The infrastructure we are currently building to allow us to meet these challenges starts from a single very simple premise:
Individuals require control over access to and use of their personal data
Different people will engage with this in different ways and to different degrees. By analogy with personal finances, some will desire very detailed control, auditing and understanding of their data while others will want only a basic monthly statement describing use.
Similarly, such personal data has stringent privacy requirements: some will want to minimise exposure of their data by leaving it where it is collected while others may want to extract and archive all their data however it is generated.
As a direct result, we support federation of data sources, both local and cloud-hosted, and we provide interfaces supporting third-party access to personal data that is controlled, auditable and privacy-preserving.
For those interested in the technical details of how we are building this infrastructure, here are some of the projects we’re currently working on:
Dataware, an ecosystem supporting processing of your data by others for mutual benefit
Amara, an infrastructure for those users who want their own personal cloud without the hassle
Signpost, integrating connectivity between your personal devices and services on the public Internet
dns.me, a one-stop identity server emphasising ease-of-use and device integration without relying on third-party infrastructure
Other projects with which we are involved and which are very relevant to this programme are:
Homework is creating the next generation of domestic networking infrastructure, combining empirical understanding of use with fundamental re-invention of the protocols, models and architectures in a domestic setting
Mirage is an exokernel for constructing secure, high-performance network applications across a wide range of platforms from mobile phones to the Xen hypervisor that powers much of the public cloud