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This paper frames this socio-technical challenge as a dataflow management problem. We propose a bolt-on data escrow architecture through delegated computation. In our model, instead of data flowing to platforms, platforms delegate their computation to a trustworthy escrow. This inversion empowers individuals with transparency and control over their dataflows. We present four contributions: (1) a dataflow model that explicitly incorporates computational purpose as a first-class primitive; (2) a minimally invasive programming interface, run(access(), compute()), built on a unified relational interface that virtualizes on-device data sources and a computation offloading component; (3) a concrete implementation of our escrow within the Apple ecosystem, demonstrating its practicality; and (4) both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrating that our solution is expressive enough to implement a wide range of dataflows from real-world applications and introduces minimal runtime overhead. In summary, our work serves as a stepping stone toward achieving personal dataflow sovereignty.
From: Zhiru Zhu [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 2 Aug 2024 21:26:57 UTC (564 KB)
[v2]
Fri, 29 Nov 2024 06:55:23 UTC (574 KB)
[v3]
Sat, 10 Jan 2026 07:44:59 UTC (581 KB)
[v4]
Sat, 4 Jul 2026 13:35:27 UTC (2,360 KB)
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