Data Trusts as a Service: Providing a platform for multi‐party data sharing

The major setback for data sharing is that data producers (i.e., subjects) are not able to determine how their data is being used/misused by data collectors (custodians). In view of this challenge, data trusts have been suggested to solve the problem of mistrust in multi-partner data sharing scenarios. In this research, we proposed Data Trusts as a Service (DTaaS), a cloud-based platform designed to support multi-partner data sharing that allows data subjects to see where their data are. They can also use the designed DTaaS to control who can access their information and what it can be used for based on policies/contracts. The DTaaS uses blockchain to enforce provenance and auditability, events to monitor data streams, and visualization to analyze workflows. Evaluations of the implementation of DTaaS show that the system is transparent, enables data subjects to track their data in a multi-data sharing environment, and promotes trustworthiness between stakeholders.