> Drawbacks: Obviously the main drawback, for now, is that you need to have a wallet and use things like Metamask, but even more that adoption is still quite low and it can be hard to promote something like this at a bigger company.
I would think a major drawback is that it’s illegal in large parts of the world. Certainly under the GDPR (but I think this predates that by decades and also applies to ¿parts of? the USA), companies aren’t allowed to keep employment data around when they no longer have a use for it, so when or some time after people leave the company, the data would have to be deleted.
Employee owned ⇒ every person gets their own blockchain that they then can falsify at will, or there’s a single blockchain with items that are encrypted in a way that doesn’t even allow third parties to find out about whom each item is, and also allows individuals to selectively open up each of their individual items (otherwise, it isn’t fully “employee owned”.
The chain likely wouldn’t be more than “an item with secure hash Foo exists. Here it is, encrypted using whatever method its owner deemed acceptable at the time (maybe not even the latter. If I own the data, I should be able to improve its encryption, or remove it altogether)
That has some value; employees wouldn’t be able to retroactively insert stuff, but that’s about it.
Do you see there being any alternative option (not sure if Berner's Lee Solid can play a part here)?
A company called Velocity Labs has done a private blockchain where third parties issue credentials on a 'Career Wallet', but it's more on verification of employment, courses and such.
If you think about it, current solutions (including Linkedin's recommendations) are the same thing, just centralized.
I would think a major drawback is that it’s illegal in large parts of the world. Certainly under the GDPR (but I think this predates that by decades and also applies to ¿parts of? the USA), companies aren’t allowed to keep employment data around when they no longer have a use for it, so when or some time after people leave the company, the data would have to be deleted.
That’s not a feature blockchains are good at.