Trust and privacy on the internet: The solution is ahead

Abstract

Who has stopped and thought about their data out there on the internet? Data about a person: Twitter followers, Facebook friends, eBay reputation. Or data about one’s company: purchase record, customer lists, customer credit card numbers. Data are spread around, most often only protected with passwords and too easily accessible. The Digital Asset Grid (DAG) is a research project run by Innotribe (the innovation arm of SWIFT) in 2012, which envisions a solution to this problem using the following components: a crowd-sourced, user-centric identity; privacy and trust on the internet, based on the Respect Trust Framework; an infrastructure for secure storage and exchange of digital assets. This paper explores the DAG and looks at the status of the project.