Amber: decoupling user data from web applications

Abstract

User-generated content is becoming increasingly com-mon on the Web, but current web applications isolate their users ’ data, enabling only restricted sharing and cross-service integration. We believe users should be able to share their data seamlessly between their applications and with other users. To that end, we propose Amber, an architecture that decouples users ’ data from applications, while providing applications with powerful global queries to find user data. We demonstrate how multi-user appli-cations, such as e-mail, can use these global queries to efficiently collect and monitor relevant data created by other users. Amber puts users in control of which applica-tions they use with their data and with whom it is shared, and enables a new class of applications by removing the artificial partitioning of users ’ data by application. 1