Normal social media platforms use centralisation of personal data, and it’s looking like a really bad thing for individuals, and indeed, society as a whole.

However, we can make a decentralised social media platform to address the issues.

Please see my article “Protect Your Social Media” for more information and screenshots of this solution.

A Decentralised Social Media Platform

Here is one possible solution:

I’ve got my personal data with me. It’s my email address, telephone number, home address, passport etcetera.

Either I know what my personal data is, for example my mobile phone number, or I can produce it when required, for example my passport.

My problem, and yours too I expect, is that I distribute my personal data too freely. If I am asked for my email address by a website I’m using, I usually give it. I certainly have in the past, although I’m a little more reticent now that I know what it costs me.

Sometimes, other people distribute my email address. This has been going on for years. Now, most of the emails I get are from companies I no longer deal with or I’ve never even heard of, trying to sell me something that I no longer want, or have never wanted. …

My personal data is my email address, telephone number, home address, date-of-birth, sex, etcetera. Basically, any data that is pertaining specifically to me.

The practice of organisations keeping many individuals’ personal data in one place for easy processing is personal data centralised by organisations, normally called centralised data.

Alternatively, personal data could be stored in a distributed manner, and organisational access to it could be granted by the individuals who own it. That would be personal data distributed by individuals, often called decentralised data in our organisation-centric world.

Summary

In today’s world, our personal data is usually stored and controlled by organisations.

In tomorrow’s world, personal data will be stored and controlled by its owners, us.

Discussion

What is personal data?

It’s our email address, telephone numbers, home address, bank account details, location, preferred hot drink, basically any data pertaining to us.

Who owns our personal data?

We do.

Where is our personal data stored, and who controls it?

In today’s world, our personal data is usually stored and controlled by organisations:

Discussion

Where is the ideal location to store personal data?

In this article, we discuss the person that owns the personal data and the organisation that uses the personal data. Other models are available.

Each organisation interacts with multiple people:

Introduction

In our article “Smart Contracts Sharing Common Data”, we described why and how Solidity Smart Contracts share common data.

However, the technique used to share common data amongst Solidity smart contracts is also applicable to Solidity libraries. This article describes how to implement that and compares the gas consumption of smart contract and library solutions.

This method is supported by Solidity v0.6.4 onwards.

Example Model

For this article, we assume that we are building a solution that matches “Smart Contracts Sharing Common Data”, that is, a Router contains a Producer that produces some objects that are queued for a Consumer to consume. The actual functionality and use of the subordinate libraries does not really concern us in this aticle. …

There are many possible models of interaction between multiple smart contracts. In the example for this article, we consider a simple Producer to Consumer model, so that we can focus on the theme of sharing common data:

Background

In my article “Sorting in Solidity without Comparison”, I compared various sorting techniques on Solidity memory arrays. In summary, my conclusion, according to the provided code, data and tests, was that the Unique Sort on dynamic uint memory arrays was most suitable for my particular application. If you need to sort Solidity storage arrays, consider the article “Shadowing Solidity Storage Variables in Memory” which illustrates the best technique.

Following my further articles “Value Arrays in Solidity” and “Dynamic Value Arrays in Solidity”, I revisit the Unique Sort algorithm here, to determine whether using value arrays can improve performance further.

Discussion

A Value Array is simply an array held in a value type, as opposed to a reference array. Solidity runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) which has a very large machine word of 256bits (32bytes). It is this latter feature that enables us to consider using Value Arrays. …