Citizens give up data in blockchain project to improve cities

Citizens give up data in blockchain project to improve cities

Activism has never been so easy. Urban residents will soon be giving up their personal data – not to the usual social media giants, but to make their cities a better place to live.

The three-year EU-funded project, dubbed the Decentralised Citizen Owned Data Ecosystem (DECODE), will see a total of four pilot trials launch in Barcelona and Amsterdam at the end of 2017. In each city, 1000 people will be given an app through which they can share data about themselves to help companies or government groups create products or services to improve the city. The project is due to end in 2019.

Each citizen will be able to decide exactly how much of their data is uploaded to the platform and how it should be used. For example, a person may decide that location-tracking data about parks they visit can be used by the city council but not private companies.

Individuals’ data-sharing preferences will be stored on the blockchain – a digital ledger that securely stores data across a network of computers. This is the same technology that underpins bitcoin transactions and in theory makes it difficult for individuals to be identified.

Jonathan Bright at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK thinks it’s a good idea for cities to use crowdsourced citizen data to help make planning decisions. “There’s really a lot of good that can be done with public data,” he says.

Nesta, a UK innovation charity, is working with 13 partner agencies across the European Union on the €5 million project. The DECODE website criticises online companies for hoarding data about people and refusing to make it available to “people and organisations who want to create solutions and services for public benefit”.

“People don’t really have control over their data,” says Tom Symons, a Nesta researcher leading the work on DECODE. He hopes the project will end up channelling public data into a greater number of socially beneficial projects run by the government or companies.

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