Toward Owners’ Control in Digital Data Markets

Finding a good balance between the availability of data for analysis and the control that individuals should exercise over their own data is a key requirement for generating innovation and growth in our data-driven society. A promising direction is the development of data market platforms where individuals can directly provide their own data and monetize them by making them selectively available to data consumers. Data market platforms are often based on the cloud paradigm and can be managed by parties that may be not fully trusted, or even be malicious, thus introducing new data security and privacy issues. In this article, we discuss the issues and challenges toward empowering individuals to use a data market platform for trading their data while keeping control over them. We also discuss how existing techniques can be possibly adapted to address these issues and highlight aspects that still need to be investigated.