The Blockchain and Life Management Platforms

Life Management Platforms (LMPs) aim to deliver data sovereignty: individuals and organizations should ultimately own and control their personal information, deciding who can access which data, for what purpose, and when access can be revoked. In practice, sovereignty and custodianship often diverge, and today’s digital services largely rely on verbal assurances and legal frameworks (such as GDPR) that still require users to trust providers and enforcement. LMPs combine protected personal data stores, personal cloud computing environments, and trust frameworks, enabling privacy-aware, device-independent life administration. They require stringent confidentiality, integrity, and availability; fine-grained, attribute-level access control; and life-event handling such as credential recovery, emergency access, and “personal information wills” that transfer ownership in death, health crises, or when minors reach adulthood.

Key challenges limiting mainstream adoption are inadequate user trust, persistent risks from hackers and insider abuse in centralized repositories, and the unresolved problem that “once information is disclosed, it is out of control.” Current ecosystems lack reliable “sticky policies” that travel with shared data, making it difficult to prevent onward sharing or misuse by recipients.

Blockchains can strengthen LMPs by offering decentralized architectures, independently verifiable tamper-evident logs, and smart contracts. Consensus algorithms can provide objective, mathematical proof of integrity (and confidentiality via cryptography), enabling users to track transactions and auditors to verify integrity without viewing personal data. Multi-party cryptography and quorum-based key recovery can reduce “keys to the kingdom” risks while preserving supportability for lost credentials and life events. However, blockchains do not yet solve ongoing control of data after third-party sharing; approaches like homomorphic encryption remain constrained by performance and operational limits. The paper recommends prioritizing LMP requirements and design principles over choosing specific blockchain implementations, given varying maturity and trade-offs (especially proof-of-work performance costs).

• Life Management Platforms combine personal data stores, personal cloud-based computing environments, and trust frameworks.
• LMPs require confidentiality, integrity, and availability for highly sensitive data such as health and financial records.
• Granular access control in LMPs is needed down to attribute level to keep identity relationship contexts separate.
• LMPs must support life events, including transferring ownership of data in death or emergencies.
• The core third-party sharing problem is that once data is disclosed, the original individual loses control.
• Blockchains are distributed, append-only linear data structures that chain transactions using hashing algorithms.
• Bitcoin’s blockchain is public, unauthenticated, and permissionless, allowing global nodes to verify transactions.
• Proof-of-work sacrifices performance to guarantee integrity and requires high computing resources.
• Independent auditors can verify blockchain integrity without accessing the personal data stored on or referenced by the chain.
• Homomorphic encryption is described as enabling operations on encrypted data but carrying high performance penalties and operational limitations.

• “Individuals and organizations should be the ultimate owners of their personal information”
• “Blockchains can provide objective, mathematical proof of trustworthiness rather than simple verbal assurances of trust”
• “The problem with sharing data is: ‘Once it’s out, it’s out of control’”
• “User controlled access control leads to a key principle of LMPs:data sovereignty”
• “There is no such thing as perfect security”
• “No attacker or insider should ever be able to hit ‘the information jackpot’ by compromise/abuse of privileged credentials.”
• “It is highly unlikely we will ever see a single identity solution, even if it is completely user-controlled.”
• “The determinant success factor will be usability and adoption by mainstream online services.”
• “We have signed away our privacy to many of these organizations simply due to how easy it is to use their services.”
• “What remains key is to focus on the design principles and requirements, and then explore the many ways in which these requirements can be met using differing technical approaches.”