Flemish government sets up company to build digital data vault
The Flemish government has founded a company that will develop a personal data vault for citizens. The company is called Athumi, is a continuation of the Data Utility Company and will use the open standard Solid.
The Flemish government has Athumi set up with the aim of developing a so-called ‘data vault’. This is a digital safe in which Flemish people can place personal data. They can then share this with other agencies that are affiliated with the initiative. The data vault is not yet available, but Athumi is already working on two initiatives: a career vault and a health vault. With the first one, Flemish people can save their work history and diplomas and share them with, for example, a future employer. A collaboration had previously been set up with employment agency Randstad. In the health vault this can be done with data that can be shared with hospitals, doctors or other healthcare providers.
Although the safes are intended to put citizens ‘in charge and manage their own data’, Athumi insists that the data can also be used anonymously for research. “By analyzing data from thousands of people in a controlled and strictly anonymous manner, health scientists can gain important insights,” Athumi writes. This data is not currently stored centrally anywhere and is therefore difficult to use by researchers, but the data vault should make it easier for citizens to share that data anonymously with those researchers.
The vault Athumi is working on is based on the Solid standard from The Solid Project. This is an internet specification for creating silos and data vaults in which Tim Berners-Lee, among others, is involved. It was previously announced that Microsoft would integrate its identity and access package Entra into the project, but Athumi is no longer writing anything about that. Well it is the Flemish Smart Data Space platform involved in the project.
In the future, the project should also be able to be linked to the European identity wallet that is currently being worked on. Several European companies are already working on their own initiatives to set up their own wallet, but it is not clear how the Flemish vault should fit into this in the future.