Trust, confidence and Verifiable Data Audit
Data can be a powerful force for social progress, helping our most important institutions to improve how they serve their communities. As cities, hospitals, and transport systems find new ways to understand what people need from them, theyre unearthing opportunities to change how they work today and identifying exciting ideas for the future.Data can only benefit society if it has societys trust and confidence, and here we all face a challenge. Now that you can use data for so many more purposes, people arent just asking about whos holding information and whether its being kept securely they also want greater assurances about precisely what is being done with it.In that context, auditability becomes an increasingly important virtue. Any well-built digital tool will already log how it uses data, and be able to show and justify those logs if challenged. But the more powerful and secure we can make that audit process, the easier it becomes to establish real confidence about how data is being used in practice.Imagine a service that could give mathematical assurance about what is happening with each individual piece of personal data, without possibility of falsification or omission. Imagine the ability for the inner workings of that system to be checked in real-time, to ensure that data is only being used as it should be.