arXiv subjects

Jose Garcia-Alonso

Publications and source records attributed to Jose Garcia-Alonso.

20 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Personal Data Gentrification

We live in an era in which the most valued services are not paid for in money, but in personal data. Every day, service providers collect the personal information of billions of individuals, information that sustain their infrastructure by marketing profiles labeled with this information to personal data consumers, such as advertisers. Not all uses of this personal data are for marketing; data consumers can also include, for instance, public health authorities tracking pandemics. In either case, individuals have undergone a process of Personal Data Gentrification, as data ownership has shifted from individuals to service providers and data consumers, as if the data is worth nothing to the individuals; these new owners then harness the data to obtain large profits. Current privacy-enhancing technologies are beginning to allow individuals to control and share less information. However, not sharing individuals' personal information at all could lead to Personal Data Blight, in which the potential of personal data in applications that benefit all of society remains forever latent. In this paper, we propose Personal Data Enfranchisement as a middle ground, empowering individuals to control the sharing of their personal information to shift the business flows of personal information. Based on these insights, we propose a model to gradually and incrementally make a shift from our current situation towards one of Personal Data Enfranchisement. Finally, we present a roadmap and some challenges towards achieving this bold vision.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Blockchains' federation for integrating distributed health data using a patient-centered approach

Today's world is a globalized and connected one, where people are increasingly moving around and interacting with a greater number of services and devices of all kinds, including those that allow them to monitor their health. However, each company, institution or health system usually store its patients' data in an isolated way. Although this approach can have some benefits related with privacy, security, etc., it also implies that each one of them generates different, incomplete and possibly contradictory views of a patient's health data, losing part of the value that this information could bring to the patient. That is the reason why researchers from all over the world are determined to replace the current institution-centered health systems with new patient-centered ones. In these new systems, all the health information of a patient is integrated into a unique global vision. However, some questions are still unanswered. Specifically, who should store and maintain the information of a given patient and how should this information be made available for other systems. To address this situation, this work proposes a new solution towards making the Personal Health Trajectory of patients available for both, the patients themselves and health institutions. By using the concept of blockchains' federation and web services access to the global vision of a person health can be granted to existing and new solutions. To demonstrate the viability of the proposal, an implementation is provided alongside the obtained results in a potential scenario.

cs.SE↗