Decentralised architectures and networks are slowly embedding themselves into the technological and societal landscape, empowered by communities of like-minded people who strive to alter the existing socio-economic order by leveraging peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies that afford disintermediation and radical shifts in how entities maintain trust. Bottom-up initiatives, free from centralised control and command structures, are appearing cross-sectorally – built on the premise, and promise, of distributed ledger technology.
In this article, we discuss one such initiative, Swarm, by drawing relations between its developed set of community-centred, bottom-up Fair Data Principles and the incumbent, top-down, principles-based frameworks that govern today’s existing data-sharing economy, with a focus on data protection.