Data consumption methods and trends are rapidly changing. However, data has never been more fragmented and will continue to remain fragmented and decentralized in The New Data Economy. This means that the data is connected through a specific network. Once it's connected, the data can be transferred, shared and accessed by a host of entities in various industries. In the New Data Economy, technological advancements such as smartphones, smart homes and social media outlets produce an immense amount of data. However, the data it generates is valueless until it is transformed into insights and information that companies can utilize, and only then does it become incredibly valuable. The New Data Economy is based on buying, sharing, and selling that generated data within a reliable ecosystem. Since companies see value in customers’ data as it provides insights, it can be transformed into statistics, and be useful for analytics, Organizations are willing to purchase that data, thereby allowing data owners to monetize their data.
Unfortunately, the technical implementation of the new data economy network has many challenges. These challenges include processing, organizing disparate data from many different data owners and sharing them securely among participants in the ecosystem. Fortunately, a new option is now technologically possible; connecting the fragmented data sets into one digital rights enforcement chain. Think about it like a set of music creations by different artists that is now virtually combined into one beautiful concerto. Anyone listening to this concerto would seamlessly interact with the song through dynamic rules and requests into the data that is managed by a series of autonomous bots. Almost like an embassy that travels with your data. The autonomous bots react to new parties or to request to access this virtual set of data. The magic of #SmartContracts is the bidirectional rules enforcement; basically a policy enforcer. #SmartContracts’ Autonomous Continuous Policy Enforcement and Consent Management is an advantageous technological advancement that allows one to retain ownership over their data rights regardless of the data’s location and who holds possession of that data.
Data Fragmentation
Prior to the inception of Autonomous Continuous Consent Management, data fragmentation caused individuals and organizations’ data to be easily exposed and vulnerable to harmful breaches. One such reason is because these organizations have data stored in different formats such as emails, documents, images, and videos with the data located in various storage locations such as databases, file systems and applications. In addition, there was no easy way to track their own data’s whereabouts and how it was being used.
New and nascent platforms have no issue organizing data into a user centric approach. On the other hand, legacy ladened organizations have attempted to solve this problem by consolidating data into modern data warehouses, lakes or swamps. However, it’s impossible to physically migrate and replicate all data to one central location, due to various restrictions such as compliance and cost. Externally, there is alternative data that organizations inadvertently collect (e.g driving records from your insurance tracking device) or would like to collect to improve their own products and services. That data can be purchased from providers although consolidating them with internal data would introduce another level of complexity. Decentralized data is highly valuable because firms and researchers accumulate crucial information from this type of data. Because this type of data is indispensable, these companies are willing to pay a high price for it, making it desirable for data owners to sell their data.
Distributing Fragmented Data
Once data is centralized, additional application programs are built to re-distribute certain data to different groups of users. Intracompany and intercompany data sharing face similar challenges.
Management of user entitlements and maintenance of these services introduces operational overhead
Tracking of data lineage is often nonexistent or requires scanning and parsing of system logs
Prevention of data re-distribution is often contractual and difficult to enforce
Compliance and regulation might require additional user consent before data is shared, which is typically manual and takes time
Certain sensitive information may only be shared within a limited time period and there’s no guarantee of data security post expiration
These difficulties make the distribution of fragmented data undesirable, yet organizations are forced to do this because it has been the only solution to organize their data thus far. Virtual Digital Rights Networks (DRN) powered with Autonomous Continuous Consent Management is a new and sophisticated system of enforcing and tracking data rights.
Is there a solution?
At One Creation, we firmly believe that the ultimate and future proof solution to the above issues is a Digital Rights Enforcement And Management platform (DREAM™) which is powered by a combination of sophisticated #SmartContracts app with Automatic Consent capabilities and our powerful encryption mechanisms. It works as follows:
All participants are verified users and trusted parties in this ecosystem
All data remains in its existing location (known as a virtual data vault)
A data publisher (includes both data owners and data distributors) extracts metadata from each data vault
A data publisher creates data rights policies that consist of digital terms and conditions, which are stored in #SmartContracts. These terms and conditions could include reward terms such as various currency for monetization or reward points
When a data consumer requests certain data that meets the terms and conditions in the #SmartContracts, the digital contracts automatically executes and the data consumer receives orchestrated data in a secure envelope
For time sensitive data, this secure envelope contains a timer that will auto-revoke the data consumer’s access on an expiration date
If the data is accidentally shared/leaked to unauthorized parties, the key in the secure envelope re-generates, making it much harder to decipher
Data publishers have a real time lineage to view as the data travels
Step 5-8 happen automatically and in real time, without human intervention
This model not only solves organizations' pain points but also enables individual consumers to become alternative data providers (Democratizing User’s Data). This means that they can provide organizations with non-traditional data to give them better insights on improving their products and services. In addition, organizations automatically receive users' consent, improving transparency and trust, therefore, gaining higher ESG scores.
One Creation’s plug and play DREAM™ Fabric, Secure Fabric, and Exchange Fabric makes it easy to adopt this Autonomous Continuous Consent Management model within your organization. Login to our GUI, integration with our RESTful API with a few lines of code, install us on premise, or, mix and match.