Every data-sharing platform has the same weak point
Organisations that need to share personal data — between hospitals and care providers, banks and regulators, researchers and citizens — almost always solve it the same way: build a central repository, copy the data into it, and manage access with policy.That design creates three problems at once.
It concentrates risk. A central store of personal data is a single target. Every copy made is another copy to secure, another copy to keep current, another copy to delete when someone withdraws consent.
It makes compliance a process instead of a property. Erasure, minimisation and purpose limitation become workflows that have to be executed correctly, every time, by everyone. When they fail, they fail silently.
It leaves the person out. The individual whose data is being shared typically has no view of who holds what, no way to check whether a permission is still being honoured, and no practical mechanism to withdraw it.
dataU is built on the opposite premise: don't move the data, move the permission.
Fully decentralized and end-to-end encrypted, dataU is leading the way to a more secure future.
Personal data stays where it already lives — with the organisation that holds it, under its own control. dataU governs whether it may be accessed, by whom, for what purpose, and for how long.
A network of nodes that holds permission state and nothing else. No node stores personal data. There is no central repository to breach, and no single point of failure to take the network offline.
ProxyU sits with the data processor and validates every request against the permission that authorises it. A request without a matching, current consent record is not fulfilled. Enforcement happens at the point of access, not in a policy document.
Every data attribute gets a persistent identifier, independent of how each organisation names things internally. Consent is granted against those identifiers, so a permission means precisely the same thing to every party — at any granularity, from a single field to a whole category.
Consent events and permission changes are recorded on a permissioned blockchain. What is recorded is the fact of the
consent — never the data it refers to, and never a hash of it.
That is precisely what keeps erasure workable.
What you get on top of the platform
Modules developed with our research partners, available to applications built on dataU.
Personal Data Wallet — a citizen-facing home for frequently used personal data, with selective sharing and full portability.
Consent Designer — plain-language consent creation, so an individual can see exactly what they are agreeing to, for what purpose, and for how long.
Audit Dashboard — every access, denial, grant and withdrawal, rendered in language a non-specialist can act on.
Questionnaire Tool — GDPR-native data collection for research and engagement.
RewardU — a mechanism for recognising citizens who choose to contribute data, designed so that incentives are transparent and per-source.
Risk Management Module — continuous monitoring for anomalies and unauthorised access, with alerting to the individual, not only the operator.
Personal Data Analyser — transparency reporting on how personal data is collected, processed and stored across a connected ecosystem.
dataU didn't start as a product pitch. It started as European research infrastructure, and it has been built and tested in public programmes ever since.
The origin of the architecture. A privacy-enhanced dashboard giving citizens control over personal data held by public administrations, using a permissioned blockchain and smart contracts. Piloted in Italy, Spain, France and Malta; coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.
dataU is the project's designated Key Exploitable Result. Ten Open Call innovators integrated dataU as their data-sharing layer, their platforms collectively reaching tens of thousands of citizens. Independently assessed at TRL 7 by ZSI. Zero GDPR incidents recorded across the programme.
Integration into an AI-driven food sustainability platform, and the source of three modules now in the dataU stack: a data-sharing reward system, a personal data analyser and a risk management module.
Citizen science laboratories across six European countries, with a Personal Data Wallet and questionnaire infrastructure that let citizens contribute to research while retaining control of what they contribute.
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