Privacy by design . Value chain Data protection for the 21st century

SmartData is a research program to develop web-based intelligent agents that will perform two tasks: securely store an individual’s personal and/or proprietarydata, and protect the privacy and security of the data by only disclosing it inaccordance with instructions authorized by the data subject. The vision consists of aweb-based SmartData agent that would serve as an individual’s proxy in cyberspaceto protect their personal or proprietary data. The SmartData agent (which ‘houses’the data and its permitted uses) would be transmitted to, or stored in a database, notthe personal data itself. In effect, there would be no personal or proprietary “raw” data out in the open—it would instead be housed within a SmartData agent, muchlike we humans carry information in our “heads;” extending the analogy, it would bethe “human-like clone” that would be transmitted or stored, not the raw data. Thebinary string representative of a SmartData agent would be located in local or centraldatabases. Organizations requiring access to any of the data resident within the agentwould query it once it had been “activated.” In this paper, we provide a preliminaryoverview of the SmartData concept, and describe the associated research anddevelopment that must be conducted in order to actualize this vision