1 Management Summary
Can blockchains enable Life Management Platforms and encourage widespread user adoption? This paper examines some of the core challenges of LMPs - which are not only technical in nature but as they relate to gaining sufficient trust to allow for mainstream user adoption – and how blockchain technologies can respond to these challenges. The key challenges of LMPs today are:
- Gaining sufficient user trust of LMP solutions given the highly sensitive nature of personal data that these solutions would be storing, processing and sharing with third parties
- The protection against the abuse of privileged access to an LMP personal data store, while still providing good levels of supportability to manage lost user credentials or critical life events
- The on-going protection of personal data even after it is shared with a third party
Blockchains can most certainly assist in the first point by providing demonstrable proof of data integrity and confidentiality to end users: mathematical proof over mere trust. Related blockchain technologies such as multi-party public key cryptography can also mitigate against the risks of privileged access abuse by providing novel approaches to key management. Yet the final point remains a challenge for which blockchain technologies have no immediate answers.
The recommendations of this paper are to focus on the core requirements of LMPs, rather than focusing on the low-level technical implementation details such as which blockchain technology to use. This is especially important given the maturity levels of many proposed and existing blockchain solutions.
