Today we are well served by many cloud services which provide applications that make our life so well connected: LinkedIn, Google (gmail, plus, drive, youtube, …), Apple, Facebook, and so on. But they all generally require our individual data to be stored centrally with the cloud service provider. A central data store, often out of our control, introduces integrity and privacy issues that are becoming more obvious through the Wikileaks (2012) and Snowdon (2013) disclosures and through the various illegal breaches of corporate data stores that have occurred, including the disclosure of credit card information (e.g., Target in 2013) or the whole corporate data store (Sony Pictures in 2014). Otherwise trusted governments even release protected personal data to shame their own citizens.

In January 2014 Togaware began work on EcoSysL to deliver a platform and apps that hands control of personal data back to the individual via new APIs dedicated to personalised data access. The risk of widespread and comprehensive compromise, often illegally, is dramatically reduced.

We are developing a framework where data is managed locally by an ecoCryb running on a smart device. All data is encrypted by the ecoCryb and after authentication the encrypted data is sent to an ecoCloud service hosted on the same device or in the cloud (e.g., Nextcloud on Linode). The ecoCloud is the platform for the storage of an individual’s data, and the individual decides how and where this is stored, with solutions to store on their own personal devices (smartphones) or in their homes (e.g., on FreedomBox), but accessible anywhere, anytime, under the individual’s control.

A number of EcoSysL apps are under development. The vision is to provide the same level of services provided by Linked-In, Google, Apple, Facebook, and others—offering the same services on a platform where the individual owner of the data stores personal data themselves, encrypted.

Visit EcoSysl.

This site is hosted in the cloud by OpalStack.