DOP · Data Ownership Platform: turning privacy laws from an obstacle to an opportunity

Ground-breaking innovation of the underlying systems upon which our society is built cannot be enacted by fitting new facts into old schemes. Disruptive solutions require a paradigm shift that could be paralleled to a Copernican Revolution of our time. The revolution I’d like to see unfold is the introduction of a new, decentralised, and distributed data economy. EcoSteer, an IoT and Blockchain start-up for data ownership and monetisation I co-founded, aims at doing precisely that. Data is rapidly becoming the sustenance fuelling economic growth and innovation, yet its economy is utterly asymmetrical and controlled by a handful of tech giants. Moving away from a centralised approach, where digital platforms that collect consumers’ data have exclusive control over third party access, EcoSteer Data Ownership Platform technically implements a decentralised vision, where each consumer can directly control visibility over her data by each individual third party.Based on a patented multicast end-to-end encryption scheme and Smart Contracts, the DOP adds a layer of data access control decentralization on top of any existing data brokering platform, transforming it into a neutral and blind ‘data intermediary’ . Consumers can unilaterally grant (& revoke) access to their IoT data streams to selected third parties and be compensated in tokens for data sharing, thus promoting ‘data altruism’.Decentralisation of the Data Economy, as well as availability of the means for everyone to become an active stakeholder - be it a business or an individual - ensures that the market is dynamic, inclusive and heterogenous. More participants to the data economy mean more opportunities for data monetisation, steeper and quicker economic growth, and sustainable data-driven decisions.EcoSteer DOP, thus, enables European Companies to become the leaders of a new data economy, based on the ethical principles established by the GDPR.