Transparency and Audibility, along with Pseudo-anonymity — Are Key To A Trusted World

Do you trust your government not to snoop on you? Well, if you are in Estonia or Finland, the answer is possibly, “Yes!”, but in many other countries, governments do not have a strong track record in making sure that citizens trust the governments to handle their data in a trusted way. In Figure 1, we see varying levels of trust within the handling of health care data in various EU countries, and where Finland and the Netherlands score well.

Figure 1: Trust in dealing with health-related data [3]

In the UK an anonymous blog post virtually killed-off the roll-out of a citizen ID system, as it outlined how the government would use the system to spy on their citizens. A nightmare world thus involves the tax collector looking at your health record, and your GP looking at your tax return. To increase trust, we need to develop ways that data can be linked across government systems (and generally across the Internet), but not be used to spy on citizens.

With the ever-increasing number of data breaches, users are generally losing trust in the way that their data is handled. In fact a recent survey showed that only 3% of users in Europe actually trusted their cloud…