Welcome to the Locker Project :: TLP

As we go through our lives we create vast amounts of data about our actions, interests, intentions, communications, relationships, locations, behaviors and creative and consumptive efforts. Our emails, phone calls, social network posts, photos, utility bills, text message records and further innumerable sets of data are born out of the regular course of our actions. Even those of us who aren’t engaged in social media networks create a wide wake of data in their paths.

Currently, this data is fragmented and scattered. It lives in and is usually owned by the various networks in which it is created or exchanged. It is aggregated by third party trackers and targeters looking to deliver advertising and content to you. It is bought and sold, traded and evaluated, commoditized and valued in a market largely outside the view of the people creating the data in the first place.

The value in this data serves as the basis for some of the largest power structures on the web, and in the world at large. Billions of dollars are spent tracking and analyzing the data of various social groups and market segments. Entire industries are built on the foundation of this resource.

For all the power and money tied up in this data, and all the industries built around it, the people who have benefited least from this ecosystem are the very people originating the data. Often times, in fact, the channels and organizations that host or publish the data created by individuals go out of their way to limit the ability of a person to extract their data from the network and own their content.

The Locker Project and Singly are changing that. Lockers are systems that allow people to collect all of their data into one resource that they truly own. Even the code base of the Locker Project is open source, ensuring that people can run their lockers as they see fit, where they see fit.

By using a rich system of connectors and collections, lockers make it possible to access and aggregate personal data, even when no traditional web API exists for the source. Interactions between lockers, applications, data and services are encrypted and secured via a highly secure protocol and system of authorization. Singly is working with experts and thought-leaders throughout the industry to provide open solutions to ensuring robust security for these personal data systems. This allows for even sensitive data to be safely included in a locker and made available for a person at all times.

Data ownership alone, however, doesn’t solve the problem of providing discrete value to a person. To deliver real and actionable value, Singly is extending the Locker Project’s trust and authentication ecosystem to enable application developers to build powerful products on top of personal data. We are looking to solve the parallel problems of developers’ access to and maintenance of personal data and individuals’ needs for data ownership and security, enabling a whole new class of valuable interactions between people, their data and creative developers world-wide.

 

Digital Sovereignty :: Personal Data + Identity

We believe people’s data is their own. The Locker Project (TLP) helps people do so explicitly, by providing them tools to synchronize their data into a repository that is owned by them. This data and compute resource (the locker) can serve as a data store, a primary publishing point, and/or infrastructure for applications powered by rich personal data. 

Additionally, along with being a composite of data, lockers can serve as strong identity components, unifying identities from across a range of services, and providing people with strongly composed identifiers and trust systems.

 

Persistent + Pervasive Data Access :: Personal Data Lockers

Many applications and individual uses of data rely upon consistent access to data, and access across the full historical range of data in a given set. Sadly, many data silos are becoming more and more restrictive, making it harder (if not impossible) to achieve this level of access directly through their APIs. Lockers provide a personally-owned data repository that allow individuals to bypass some of these difficulties, and to authorize and authenticate applications on top of this rich data. Lockers also enable connections with non-traditional data types, such as browser history, email records, utility records, etc (at an individual’s discretion), enabling very rare insight into a person’s data profile. 

 

Flexible Data Access + Manipulation :: Connectors + Collections

Lockers can provide extensible access to a person’s data via Connectors and Collections. Connectors represent pluggable components that maintain the interaction and sync with external services (Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc), while Collections are comprised of logic, data and APIs for abstract data that is composed from other data sources, or synthesized by applications interfacing with lockers. For instance, a Contacts collection represents all contacts from across an individual’s attached accounts, providing a unified mechanism for addressing those data entities. Extending these concepts across various data types provides a very powerful way of interacting with a person’s data.

 

Open Communication on the DHT :: Telehash

One of the primary tenets of our projects is that open and distributed communication benefits everyone. Non-blockable communication, free from biased mediation or single points of failure helps to promote dynamic communication and innovation, enabling individuals and applications to change the way they interact around the world.

Telehash, with its leverage of a Kademlia-based DHT and UDP, establishes a protocol and network which makes distributed communication and interaction much more feasible, providing a unified addressing space and the ability to traverse networks effectively. The more applications that can serve as active switches on the DHT, the more robust and flexible the system becomes.

Lockers will inherently be Telehash switches, integrating the promise of non-blockable distributed communication with the core of people’s personal data ecosystems. 

 

Get Involved :: Open Source Participation

The code for TLP is hosted at http://github.com/quartzjer/Locker, and is actively seeking development and design contribution. There is also an active community discussion on #lockerproject at irc.freenode.net. For more info and updates, follow @lockerproject on Twitter.

 

Let’s make something awesome.