dataship

Inspiration

Data is the new oil. You are the data. However you are not in control. We at Dataship believe that you should be in control, and so does the EU. The soon to be enforced GDPR gives you new digital rights. Few companies are ready for this shift in data ownership.

What it does

Dataship is your easy way to make use of your rights and for companies to respond. We help you understand what you can do with your digital rights and make it easy to take action. On our platform, you can create requests related to your data, and track their progress. Further, You can securely manage your data on our platform and decide whom you give access to.

How we built it

We researched existing solutions and were shocked not to find any open-source projects that had the empowerment of the user at it's core. We want to make a difference by offering a community-led solution with the clear intention to help all parties to be ready once the GDPR is enforced. We built a web application with an informative website and a alpha version of the data requests and managements platform.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge was and is to verify the identity of the requestor, as a mistake would mean that someone could accidentally requests and receive access to very sensitive data. Also, most data monopolies currently do not offer APIs to manage their users data, so we will have do gradually adopt these.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all worked through the whole night without sleeping or leaving the building, because we had so much fun building this together.

What we learned

GDPR is really powerful. We as European citizens are incredibly lucky to have such a subject-friendly legislation.

What's next for dataship

Once GDPR is in effect, we aspire to encourage a broad scale of EU citizens to realize their rights and claim their data (through our platform). We are aware that such data requests being a pain for companies does not help anyone. Therefore, we will integrate more B2B features which will make it easy and rewarding for companies to reply to data requests in a quick and adequate manner. On the long run we see the control management feature evolving into a stand-alone data exchange based on blockchain and tokenized data, so that dataship will function as a data wallet making smart contracts a reality.