rim: Reclaiming Personal Data Sovereignty in the Age of Wearables

The talk introduces rim, a set of protocols and an early proof-of-concept project that aim to keep intimate data from body-worn devices in the hands of the person who generates it, rather than in cloud services. The presenters argue that letting companies collect biometric streams would entrench data extraction business models, so they propose person-to-person storage and sharing. The session opened with hardware demos, including jewelry carrying SD cards and haptic force feedback between two laptops that let collaborators sense each other without words.

The central mechanism, called dissolution, splits data into pieces spread across everyday personal devices so that no single piece reveals anything, and crystallization reassembles it. The presenters described layering Shamir secret sharing over a small key with Reed-Solomon erasure coding over encrypted blocks, so a threshold of pieces is needed to read data while some losses can be tolerated. They suggested that local redundancy could replace remote services such as password recovery, and that a person could keep health or learning records and share them selectively with professionals.

In the questions, the presenters said that someone facing a border seizure could physically destroy the storage on their body, and they suggested separate thresholds for authenticating a recipient and for unlocking data. One attendee asked about using such local storage for health data for people accessing gender-affirming care outside formal channels; the presenters agreed this needed further discussion. The closing message is that building these tools before brain-computer interfaces spread gives policymakers concrete experience to shape humane rules.