Ensuring Personal Data Anonymity in Data Marketplaces through Sensing-as-a-Service and Distributed Ledger

Abstract

Personal data has undoubtedly assumed a great value with the advancements on technologies able to gather it and infer from it. The businesses that operate in a data-driven economy offer services that rely on data collected about their users and usually they store this personal information in “silos” that impede transparency on their use and possibilities of easy interactions. The introduction in EU of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) moves this economy towards a user-centered vision, in which individuals have rights for their data sovereignty and the free portability of it. However, more efforts are needed to reach both transparency and balance between privacy and data sharing. In this paper, we present a solution to promote the development of personal data marketplaces, exploiting the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and a Sensing-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, in order to enhance the privacy of individuals, following the principles of personal data sovereignty and interoperability. Moreover, we provide experimental results of an implementation based on IOTA, a promising DLT for managing and transacting IoT data