Elena Pasquali

The recent ruling of Italian State Court to fine Facebook established that consumers’ data has economic value and represents a counter-performance for online services offered by digital platforms. This enables consumers with bargaining power, involving them into the data monetization cycle. However, only by ensuring consumers’ ownership rights over their data can this data be monetized in a straightforward manner. In fact, as a consequence of the widespread adoption of connected devices generating continuous flows of data, the focus should shift from the concept of Data Privacy – protection of data sets from access by unauthorised parties – to the concept of Data Ownership – freely granting and revoking data access to legitimate parties.

Consumers’ data is the new oil yet Privacy Laws regarding sharing data with third parties limit Data Monetization opportunities. The reason why compliance is difficult is of a technical nature: all current data sharing platforms are centralized and have exclusive control over third party access to consumers’ data. By decentralizing data access control and putting it back into the hands of legal data owners, Companies can create their own Data Streams Marketplaces involving customers and business partners in a data monetization cycle that is GDPR compliant by design.

In cities there will be 75 Billion of connected IoT devices by 2030. The availability of IoT real time data through data exchange hubs holds the promise of making our cities smarter, safer, cleaner and more efficient. These are objectives we all share as citizens – but we do not want to give up control over our personal data to achieve them. The question then is – how can IoT and Data Privacy be reconciled? The unexpected answer is – with Blockchain. Blockchain will empower citizens to control access to their IoT live data, significantly increasing their trust & willingness to collaborate in making cities a better place to live.