The Irrefutable History of You: Distributed Ledgers and Semantics for Ubiquitous Personal Ratings

Abstract

A recurring theme in the science-fiction series iBlack Mirror/i is the consequence for society of an over-focus on social networking. The episode iNosedive/i imagines a future in which every public interaction a person has is rated by the other parties, and every aspect of ones life depends on the overall rating computed from these. In this paper, we show how such a scenario is already technically possible using existing technologies such as idistributed ledgers/i, and discuss means by which the negative possibilities may be ameliorated using semantic approaches.