PARCEL DEVELOPER DOCUMENTATION

Introduction to Parcel

Parcel offers a number of privacy and data control APIs that give its users greater control over how their data is used without compromising functionality. With the Parcel suite of tools, you can securely store sensitive data, define and enforce data usage policies, and share tamper-proof access history records with your users.

Parcel also gives you access to Steward, an Oasis Labs web application that makes it easy for its users to manage their data and track usage. You can integrate Steward into your existing user flows or create your own data management interface on the Parcel SDK.

From invasive ad targeting to massive data breaches, users are more interested than ever in keeping their data private and secure. Parcel allows users to manage their data, increase their trust and reduce their liability and risk.

Key concepts of Parcel

Parcel makes it easy for you to create privacy experiences and process sensitive data with less complexity by providing you with a rich and flexible set of primitives that you can use in your application:

Identity: an entity on the Oasis platform. You can think of them as “users” of Oasis. They can represent your end users, your application, or your employees.

Document: a file stored on the Oasis platform. Each document has an identity. Documents are hosted encrypted in Oasis managed blob storage, so you can easily store any type of file, including images, videos, audio, PDF, genomes, and JSON documents.

Job: A program that runs in a confidential computing environment. Jobs are used for analysis or transformation while protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the underlying data. Jobs can use documents as inputs and produce documents as outputs.

Grant: policy that allows an identity to access certain documents. Permissions allow users, including your application, to access or analyze documents belonging to other identities.

Permission: A set of related permissions that an end user can allow or deny while using an application. Optionally, you can specify permissions for your application for turnkey management of user permissions.

Basic components

There are four main components to help you build your Parcel integrations:

Developer Portal: here you register your application, register your client credentials, configure user permissions and monitor your integration.

Steward App: This is where your end users create Oasis accounts, control access to their data, and see a history of how apps like yours use their data.

REST API: allows you to work directly with all of our data management primitives from any code base.

TypeScript Client: Wraps up our REST API and makes it easy to integrate into Parcel from TypeScript and JavaScript applications.