Towards Querying in Decentralized Environments with Privacy-Preserving Aggregation

Abstract: The Web is a ubiquitous economic, educational, and collaborative space. However, it also serves as a haven for personal information harvesting. Existing decentralised Web-based ecosystems, such as Solid, aim to combat personal data exploitation on the Web by enabling individuals to manage their data in the personal data store of their choice. Since personal data in these decentralised ecosystems are distributed across many sources, there is a need for techniques to support efficient privacy-preserving query execution over personal data stores. Towards this end, in this position paper we present a framework for efficient privacy preserving federated querying, and highlight open research challenges and opportunities. The overarching goal being to provide a means to position future research into privacy-preserving querying within decentralised environments.