So I’ve been giving this some thought in light of the recent NSA PRISM program and leaks surrounding this debacle. The desire for government to want as much data as humanly possible, or anyone for that matter, is obvious. If you’re being pushed to do better, be more accurate in your terrorist predictions, etc., this is nothing but an obvious necessity.

So the question that I think Americans, and the world for this matter, needs to come to terms with, is the fact that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.

I, for one, would prefer to not have the government oversight and just deal with the fallout of terrorist attacks and other issues. I know the downsides to this are clear and uneasy, but the unforeseen consequences of the contrary are far more disturbing in my opinion.

So, if the general public isn’t going to force down on the government sweeping changes to civil policy, how can we deal with this issue directly?

Well I’m glad you asked. :) Now, I’m not going to claim to have all the specifics of this idea hammered out. I certainly do not. This is only an idea I’ve been tossing around in my head the last 2 days. That said, and as the title of this post suggests, I believe a solution of distributed data storage is the only real long term solution. Now, clearly the hurdles to accomplishing something like this are monumental, and the general public isn’t even going to understand. However, the ability for a person to own and control all their own data seems logical to me. Sure, people could mine and build out their own data and services however they wish, but when it comes to things like chat communication, email, Facebook, twitter, etc., the raw data of these services could exist under a single persons control.

Now, the question of how this is done is obviously the complex part. Initially and currently this isn’t feasible. However, I see, as networking continues to improve, personal device connectivity rates increase, and an increased desire to remove big brother, people will desire this type of ownership.

Lets take the possibility of installing a Facebook app on your mobile device and any and all data that you contribute to the platform is stored locally on your device. In order for that data to be shared your device would have to be connected and the software would have to be intelligent enough to drop all unreachable device data. Additionally you’d have to have a massive distributed database protocol of sorts.

The complexities of this are huge, the speed is an obvious concern as well as businesses’ willingness and desiring to give up control over the data that makes them money. The only way this is going to happen is if the people rise up and revolt, demanding this type of sweeping change. I’m not confident it will happen with the current businesses in existence. However, this opens up opportunity for a whole new line of startups that can build from the ground up with this type of focus. One day it will be feasible. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.