Crowd storage
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Walter S. Lasecki · 2014
This paper introduces the concept of crowd storage, the idea that digital files can be stored and retrieved later from the memories of people in the crowd. Similar to human memory, crowd storage is ephemeral, which means that storage is temporary and the quality of the stored information degrades over time. Crowd storage may be preferred over storing information directly in the cloud, or when it is desirable for information to degrade inline with normal human memories. To explore and validate this idea, we created WeStore, a system that stores and then later retrieves digital files in the existing memories of crowd workers. WeStore does not store information directly, but rather encrypts the files using details of the existing memories elicited from individuals within the crowd as cryptographic keys. The fidelity of the retrieved information is tied to how well the crowd remembers the details of the memories they provided. We demonstrate that crowd storage is feasible using an existing crowd marketplace (Amazon Mechanical Turk), explore design considerations important for building systems that use crowd storage, and outline ideas for future research in this area.