Data protection by design: Building the foundations of trustworthy data sharing

Abstract Data trusts have been conceived as a mechanism to enable the sharing of data across entities where other formats, such as open data or commercial agreements, are not appropriate, and make data sharing both easier and more scalable. By our definition, a data trust is a legal, technical, and organizational structure for enabling the sharing of data for a variety of purposes. The concept of the “data trust” requires further disambiguation from other facilitating structures such as data collaboratives. Irrespective of the terminology used, attempting to create trust in order to facilitate data sharing, and create benefit to individuals, groups of individuals, or society at large, requires at a minimum a process-based mechanism, that is, a workflow that should have a trustworthiness-by-design approach at its core. Data protection by design should be a key component of such an approach.