Acknowledging Value of Personal Information: a Privacy Aware Data Market for Health and Social Research

Gathering information to perform health or social research is a complex endeavour. Users are wary of sharing medical and, more generally, personal data. Furthermore, as they grow more conscious about privacy concerns (which is socially desirable) and of the value of their own sensitive data, obtaining information even for research purposes will become increasingly harder. On the other hand, as automatic data analysis and inference tools and techniques become more and more effective, the potential value of having greater amounts of data available increases. In this paper, we present a scenario that encompasses recent technologies to create a personal data market in which users are spurred to gather and record personal information in a secure way, maintaining ownership through cryptography. The main incentives come from the fact that research actors acknowledge user data value by purchasing it: when a research actor needs users personal information, he makes a bid, to which users respond providing the information required. We explore the possibility of using a set of technologies, such as smart contracts and trusted computing, to guarantee both the information buyer about the data quality and authenticity, and the seller that the contract will be honored, even in the total absence of reciprocal trust (the parties could be unknown to each other, or even completely anonymous).