As I understand the Solid Project, I would store my personal data and then grant access to the data. If I'm correct, then that does nothing to protect your privacy and it does nothing to ensure the authenticity of the data stored in the Pod. The authentic data economy is an approach to giving us direct control over our data while giving that data a cryptographic proof of provenance and non-revocation. The idea is that authentic data is a required part of a broader approach to e-commerce called Zero Architecture (see my other article).
It looks like the Solid Project doesn't even use differential privacy. I think it's just a standardized way to allow external access to our personal data. To preserve privacy you cannot ever give external parties access to your private data. The good thing is that we can use verifiable computation to allow external systems to give us policies to execute over our private data without revealing it. Zero Architecture uses the idea of Qualifications which are a combination of secret authentic data as inputs to a verifiable computation of a bounded, decidable computation that results in a 1-bit boolean output (e.g. Am I qualified to vote in this election in this jurisdiction? Yes/No). What the verifier receives is the 1-bit output combined with proofs of authenticity of the secret inputs, non-revocation of the secret inputs, and correct computation of the policy.
Zero Architecture is a way of designing transaction systems that use zero-trust security and zero-knowledge proofs to do real work with zero personal information. It requires Qualifications. Qualifcations require authentic data.
AFIACT, the Solid project doesn't contemplate real privacy. What's the use of trying to assert control over access to our data if the data will immediately be compied outside of my Pod and then I'll never be asked for access again. It looks like Solid requires privacy regulations to preserve privacy. Zero Architecture uses cryptography to enforce privacy with or without privacy regulations. Cryptography is real power.
