What privact does for research.
Personal data is what drives innovation today. Deep insights into what people do, want or like, how they behave, consume and act, allow us to design the solutions to solve the big and small challenges our society faces.
And with privact, all data owners are working together to build the largest database of personal data ever created. Available for research on a fair and level playing field: Researchers get answers to their questions, but never the raw data. Data owners will only participate in research they consent to, but will always maintain their anonymity, their digital privacy.
How it works
With the privact ecosystem, each user gets an individual database infrastructure. Services populate this database with personal data. This database is always under the full control of the user, which means that the user can always decide:
- where the data is stored (e.g. locally or in a cloud they trust),
- which service can work with which data, and
- what research they support with their data.
To determine user consent to participate in research, a matching of the user’s expectations and the research organization’s actions will be performed. Users and research organizations will have several categories available where users can express their expectations of good behavior from organizations and research organizations can report on their actual behavior. These categories can be diverse and will evolve over time. Some examples are: the industry, the working conditions or the environmental impact of the organizations.
In order to be allowed to conduct research on the common database, research organizations will have to sign the terms and conditions of the (yet to be established) foundation. This allows the foundation, on behalf of the actual data owners, to audit the information organizations provide about their behavior.
The federated secure aggregation protocol is used to perform the actual research. This means that by using a mixture of homomorphic and public key encryption in a federated setting, the answers to the research questions are found without revealing the underlying raw data. This protects the privacy of participating users. The research organization will also have accurate information about the bias in the results they obtain, since obviously only data from users who have consented will be included in the results.
Benefits for research
Like privact e.V., the yet-to-be-established foundation will be non-profit, but will act as a trustee for users. As such, its mission is to provide fair and open access to the largest pool of personal data for the advancement of society. This means that any research organization – large or small, for-profit or not-for-profit – will have equal access to this data pool. It is up to individual users to decide what research they want their data to be a part of.
It has never been easier, faster, more transparent or cheaper to conduct user research than with the privact system: An online tool makes it easy to formulate the research question. It takes hours to a few days to draw the required sample. The bias of the sample is completely transparent. And the cost of all this will be minimal because everything is automated.
Benefits for society
There is a two-way transparency in the privact ecosystem that benefits society. Obviously, organizations understand people better and can create solutions to social challenges large and small.
At the same time, the matching of user expectations and organizational behavior creates new political power for users and an incentive for organizations to improve their behavior. No organization will be able to get data from every data owner included in its research, simply because different users have different expectations of good organizational behavior. But each organization will know how to do better to get more data owners to participate in their research. This is a powerful incentive to improve the behavior of individual organizations for the good of society.