On the Trusted Use of Large-Scale Personal Data.
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Samuel S. Wang, Alex Pentland · 2012
Large-scale personal data has become the new oil of the Internet. However, personal data tend to be monopolized and siloed by online services which not only impedes beneficial uses but also prevents users from managing the risks associated with their data. While there is substantial legal and social policy scholarship concerning ownership and fair use of personal data, a pragmatic technical solution that allows governments and companies easy access to such data and yet protects individual rights has yet to be realized and tested. We introduce openPDS, an implementation of a Personal Data Store, which follows the recommendations of the WEF, the US NSTIC and the US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. openPDS allows users to collect, store, and give fine-grained access to their data in the cloud. openPDS also protects users ’ privacy by only sharing anonymous answers, not raw data. Indeed, a mechanism to install third-parties applications on a user’s PDS allows for the sensitive part of the data processing to take place within the PDS. openPDS can also engage in privacy-preserving group computations to aggregate data across users without the need to share sensitive data with an intermediate entity.