Tokenized Ecosystem of Personal Data — Exemplified on the Context of the Smart City

Abstract

Data driven businesses, services, and even smart cities of tomorrow depend on access to data not only from machines, but also personal data of consumers, clients, citizens. Sustain-able utilization of such data must base on legal compliancy, ethical soundness, and consent. Data subjects nowadays largely lack empowerment over utilization and monetization of their personal data. To change this, we propose a tokenized ecosystem of personal data (TokPD), combining anonymization, referencing, encryption, decentralization, and functional layering to establish a privacy preserving solution for processing of personal data. This tokenized ecosys-tem is a more generalized variant of the smart city ecosystem described in the preceding publi-cation "Smart Cities of Self-Determined Data Subjects" (Frecè & Selzam 2017) with focus to-wards further options of decentralization. We use the example of a smart city to demonstrate, how TokPD ensures the data subjects’ privacy, grants the smart city access to a high number of new data sources, and simultaneously handles the user-consent to ensure compliance with mod-ern data protection regulation.