Data Ownership, Privacy, & Collaboration

When the lines between the physical and digital worlds are blurring.

Deloitte in collaboration with Wiliot

Cheap and battery-free Bluetooth-enabled tags with advanced sensor capabilities can fully automate data collection. This enables a plethora of use cases that up till now have not been feasible, viable, and desirable. This raises the question of how the challenges around data privacy, data ethics, and data exclusivity can be addressed?

The emergence of Bluetooth-enabled tags the size of postage stamps with advanced sensor capabilities makes it possible to fully automate data generation and collection. This enables a plethora of use cases that up till now have not been feasible, viable, and desirable1.

However, concerns relating to data ethics, data privacy, and data exclusivity for competitive reasons may hamper collaboration between participants in the supply chain and their pursuit of shared benefits, especially in the form of a more data-driven retail experience in response to the ever-growing focus on increasing share-of-wallet.

To address these concerns, this paper attempts to answer the following questions:

• Who owns the data generated by a tag?
• Which claims, if any, does the producer/manufacturer, retailer, logistics provider, or any other supply chain participant have on data generated by the other participants?
• Which types of data will the tag be able to collect that are either sensitive, private, or otherwise restricted by regulations?
• What incentivizes tag owners to share data?

This paper proposes the following design principles in response to the above concerns:

• Whoever owns the tag owns the data.
• Access to and ownership of (historic) sensing data should be determined by product characteristic.
• Consumers have to opt-in to use the tag they own.
• Companies must have clear ethical standards to build the trust required to allow the collection of data.