Data Usage Control for empowering digital sovereignty for All citizens

Driven by the growing concern on the usage of personal and sensitive data in the Internet, DUCA aims at providing a framework to empower European users and organizations to take control of their data, thus easing confidentiality and personal data protection (including both personal data of citizens and confidential data produced by data-enabled organizations).

This unified framework of security and privacy-enhancing solutions incorporates a set of building blocks to support the development of a modular architecture and reference implementation that will also include techniques for measuring privacy risk exposure. To be general and flexible, the main components will be designed as platform independent to ensure the compatibility of the DUCA framework with the many architectures and deployment models of the IoE.

In order to achieve this, DUCA has the following concrete objectives:

Objective 1: To build a flexible and easy to use distributed framework for managing data sharing agreements, which will empower users to control the usage of their data.

Objective 2: To develop and integrate several security and privacy enhancing technologies and to tailor these to the specific needs of the DUCA platform and use cases.

Objective 3: To deploy and validate the overall distributed data usage control framework in several use cases.

Within the DUCA consortium, we have identified the following three use cases as relevant samples to showcase our framework: Smart energy, Usage control for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, and Collaborative mobility. Several stakeholders will benefit from the awarding of DUCA, including the seconded staff members, who will increase his/her knowledge and career opportunities, beneficiaries will improve their research and innovation activities, and overall society will gain both socially and economically from advanced data protection mechanisms being developed.