PUBLICATION
Trusting Decentralized Web Data in a Solid-based Social Network
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2024
Authors
Research Area
Event
24th International Conference on Web Engineering
Published in
Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Web Engineering
ISBN/ISSN
978-3-031-62362-2
Download
Abstract
In our current data-centric society, there is a rising concern among individuals regarding their privacy and the degree of control they have over their personal data. In response to this growing demand for transparency and control, a recent initiative for web re-decentralization has emerged, wherein web applications no longer store data centrally. One of the prominent approaches aimed at re-decentralizing the web is Solid. Solid facilitates data storage in decentralized pods secured with web access control, enabling seamless connectivity of diverse data. However, the integration of decentralized data from various third-party pods in web applications poses a significant challenge, as the data's trustworthiness may be compromised, potentially leading to malicious or harmful outcomes. Therefore, data integration necessitates a trust-aware decision, i.e., the extent to which the data is trustworthy enough to use despite its high heterogeneity. To enable such trust awareness for web applications utilizing decentralized data, we propose a trust-aware framework called TrADS for decentralized social networks. TrADS leverages the MVC pattern of web applications to integrate external data from Solid pods trust aware. The potentially malicious and harmful status of external data is an end-user concern. A web application must therefore be trust aware to provide a better user experience. Therefore, we evaluate the proposed trust-aware decentralized social network in terms of usability and transparency with 53 end users through an empirical study. The results demonstrate that the trust awareness component in TrADS can support end users in their trustworthy user experience.
Reference
Siegert, Valentin; Leichsenring, Dirk; Gaedke, Martin: Trusting Decentralized Web Data in a Solid-based Social Network. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Web Engineering, pp. 230-245, 2024.
