During the first year of my Turing Fellowship on “Enabling Contracts of Data Usage and Data Consent ”I have investigated and developed mechanisms to capture formal specifications of users’“data consent”, that is, represent personal data policies in a machine-processable language which is used to form data usage contracts that can be automatically (or algorithmically) respected by a service provider.
During this research, an implementation has been developed on top of a database management system, where consent contracts provide an evaluation mechanism that filters query results which violate any individual’s consent explicitly; then the system“propagates”consent as queries are being answered in the system, by automatically inducing more consent constraints relative to the answers of those queries.
This enhancement project aims to further develop these developing results and release an open-source system that will propel the adoption of our technology. This project will offer a solution where different sources and different consent contracts can plug into the system and then accessed and queried in a combined, unified,way while automatically respecting the specified consent.
Our research flips the perspective on the current paradigm and enables users themselves to express their personal contract around use of their data. We develop solutions to support capturing, propagation, and updating of agreements and user consent, and where data processing requests automatically/algorithmically enforce the user contracts. This technology can become really transformative in academic research, government, and industry and I believe that developing, releasing,and maintaining a solid, working, open-source code base is the key step to achieve this goal.
Principal Investigator: Dr George Konstantinidis