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Ruben Verborgh

Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data

Raf Buyle, Ruben Taelman, Katrien Mostaert, Geroen Joris, Erik Mannens, Ruben Verborgh, and Tim Berners-Lee

Governments typically store large amounts of personal information on their citizens, such as a home address, marital status, and occupation, to offer public services. Because governments consist of various governmental agencies, multiple copies of this data often exist. This raises concerns regarding data consistency, privacy, and access control, especially under recent legal frameworks such as GDPR. To solve these problems, and to give citizens true control over their data, we explore an approach using the decentralised Solid ecosystem, which enables citizens to maintain their data in personal data pods. We have applied this approach to two high-impact use cases, where citizen information is stored in personal data pods, and both public and private organisations are selectively granted access. Our findings indicate that Solid allows reshaping the relationship between citizens, their personal data, and the applications they use in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from this Flemish Solid Pilot can speed up the process for public administrations and private organisations that want to put the users in control of their data.

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Published in 2019 in Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{buyle_egose_2019,
  author = {Buyle, Raf and Taelman, Ruben and Mostaert, Katrien and Joris, Geroen and Mannens, Erik and Verborgh, Ruben and Berners-Lee, Tim},
  title = {Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia},
  editor = {Chugunov, Andrei and Khodachek, Igor and Misnikov, Yuri and Trutnev, Dmitrii},
  month = nov,
  year = 2019,
  pages = {346--359},
  series = {Communications in Computer and Information Science},
  volume = 1135,
  publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
  address = {Cham},
  isbn = {978-3-030-39296-3},
  url = {https://drive.verborgh.org/publications/buyle_egose_2019.pdf},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-39296-3_26},
}

Alternatively, pick a reference of your choice below:

ACM
Raf Buyle, Ruben Taelman, Katrien Mostaert, Geroen Joris, Erik Mannens, Ruben Verborgh, and Tim Berners-Lee. 2019. Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia (Communications in Computer and Information Science), Springer International Publishing, Cham, 346–359.
APA
Buyle, R., Taelman, R., Mostaert, K., Joris, G., Mannens, E., Verborgh, R., & Berners-Lee, T. (2019). Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data. In A. Chugunov, I. Khodachek, Y. Misnikov, & D. Trutnev (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia (Vol. 1135, pp. 346–359). Springer International Publishing.
IEEE
R. Buyle et al., “Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, Cham, 2019, vol. 1135, pp. 346–359.
LNCS
Buyle, R., Taelman, R., Mostaert, K., Joris, G., Mannens, E., Verborgh, R., Berners-Lee, T.: Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data. In: Chugunov, A., Khodachek, I., Misnikov, Y., and Trutnev, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia. pp. 346–359. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2019).
MLA
Buyle, Raf, et al. “Streamlining Governmental Processes by Putting Citizens in Control of Their Personal Data.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, edited by Andrei Chugunov et al., vol. 1135, Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp. 346–59.

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