Highlights:

  • Data trust examines human involvement rather than the engineering side of data.
  • Data trusts can be established for specific industries, such as healthcare, finance, environmental preservation, etc.

Data has become a valuable asset with enormous potential for businesses, governments, and people in this increasingly digital and connected world. The traditional idea of trusts in legal systems, where a trustee is charged with managing assets on behalf of beneficiaries, serves as the model for data trusts. This relatively new idea, “data trust,” has emerged due to growing worries about data security, privacy, and ethical use.

Even though the idea of data trusts is still in its infancy, there is growing interest in and investigation into their potential applications across numerous industries and legal systems.

What is Data Trust?

A data trust is established when a person or group transfers their data assets or rights to a trustee. The trustee, a person or an organization, will hold and manage the data on behalf of several beneficiaries and for a particular objective.

It typically entails establishing a set of principles, guidelines, and mechanisms to encourage transparency, accountability, and the ethical use of data.

The data trust framework aims to reinvigorate the world’s data economy by making it accountable and privacy-focused.

There are two essential components of data trust:

  • A Legal Agreement
  • A technology platform for data management

Other than this, data trusts can be created for particular fields, like healthcare, finance, or environmental preservation, or they can have a more general goal of addressing broader societal issues.

Although there are many different types of data trust models, they all generally entail the establishment of a separate entity or organization that serves as a trustee, holding and managing data on behalf of several stakeholders.

Benefits of Data Trust

Data trusts provide a number of advantages that tackle important issues with data governance, privacy, and responsible data use. The following are some advantages of data trust:

1) More insightful

Data trusts can combine data from numerous sources and organizations, creating a more extensive data set with more insights and predictive power than any organization’s data alone.

2) Protection of privacy

Individual privacy rights are prioritized in data trust frameworks. Using effective data governance techniques like:

  • Data anonymization
  • Encryption
  • Access controls

Data trust initiatives can protect personal data, lowering the possibility of misuse or unauthorized access.

3) Data control

Data trust doesn’t look at the technical or engineering side but looks at where people are involved. It makes data interoperability and standardization possible.

Data trust examines version control and data validation issues to ensure data hygiene throughout an organization and with partners.

4) Data sharing

Data trust can help different stakeholders to collaborate and share data.

Due to a lack of mutual trust, current systems need to improve their ability to provide a practical and transparent method for data sharing.

But, with data trust, organizations and individuals can securely share data by creating dependable platforms or mechanisms, improving research, innovation, and social advantages.

5) Access control over stakeholders and data use

You have complete security and control over who can access the data, how much, where, and what they can do with it with the help of a data trust.

The process is appropriate because it allows the entity to obtain data that relates to it. Data leaks can be stopped as a result.

Data Trust Framework

A data trust framework is a set of principles, rules, and regulations that control data trust creation, administration, and management.

Legal structures or mechanisms called data trusts are used to manage and oversee data on behalf of a specific community or group of data subjects.

Organizations must implement and automate processes for auditing, evaluating, and cleaning their data to achieve trust in a world where data is abundant.

Comprehensive data trust solutions require infrastructure that considers human and software processes. A data-centric culture must be established for data quality automation to function correctly.

The Data Management Association of the UK has defined the six dimensions of data quality to aid in measuring data trust. Let’s look at what they are:

So, data trust is necessary to create and preserve a strong data ecosystem.

Conclusion

A promising strategy for balancing the benefits and risks of data use is the creation of data trusts. Data trusts have the potential to unlock the value of data while defending individual privacy, boosting trust, and promoting equal access to the benefits of the digital age by building transparent, accountable, and privacy-enhancing frameworks.

Expand your knowledge with a wide range of data-related whitepapers.