Data Privacy

Most importantly as an organisation we want to ensure that ‘you’, the end user are in control and understand which data points you are providing to improve your experience.

An example of this might be:

“As a staff member…

I agree to share my building location…

So that my peers can see when I am in the office.“

Sharing data points such as these allows us to provide a personalised experience for you but we also want to ensure we manage this data responsibly. An approach we are investigating to support this and be good data citizens is utilising some aspects of the blockchain – in particular ‘blockchain immutability’.

We are looking at using it as a digital ledger of agreements to manage access of specific data points with our end users. Immutability is one of the qualities of the blockchain we are leveraging that helps to ensure the integrity of this data. It is important to note this is the integrity of the data, not the fact that the data may be accurate or truthful – that needs to be managed through different methods.

The immutability of the blockchain and its ability to act as a cryptographically encrypted ledger of digital transactions or agreements provides us with a great approach to managing the opt-ins and outs of data agreement and helps us to enforce or support good data privacy principles.

This cryptographic hashing process looks something like below.

This hashing process means that a block on the chain can’t be modified without affecting all subsequent blocks on the chain – this provides strong integrity of data contained on the ledger and facilitates end user control and visibility.