This project proposal is being submitted by:

• Faisal Ahmed Farooq
• Kundan Mishra

Brief Overview

In recent years, there has been a rapid advancement in technological innovation and related research on collaborative approaches for sharing users' data among enterprises. Our project provides solution to three important problems: ensuring privacy and user control, and incentives for sharing. It tracks who shared what, with whom, when, by what means, and for what purposes in a verifiable fashion. The smart contract verifies and executes the agreed terms of use of the data and transfers digital tokens as a reward to the user.

This project is inspired by several similar projects such as the B.A.T. Token provided by Brave browser which rewards users for their attention to a given ad. Another project is Ocean protocol which provides a data marketplace and is built on top of Ethereum.

Objectives

We are using ethical data collection guidelines to build this project as provided here:

• It is good practice to let people know who you are (your name, organization, and reason for collecting data when you ask them if they would like to participate.
• You should have permission from participants (people providing the data) and they should be made aware that their involvement is voluntary.
• Participants are free to withdraw from any active data collection or intervention program at any point without pressure or fear of retaliation.
• Avoid or minimize anything that will cause physical or emotional harm to participants. Make participants aware of any potential harms prior to their participation.
• Try to remain neutral and unbiased. Don’t let your personal preconceptions or opinions interfere with the data collection process.
• Collecting data (i.e. through surveys) is often done under the assumption that the information provided is confidential and the findings will be anonymous. You should let participants know when you will have to break confidentiality (e.g. in the case of harm to themselves or someone else) and whether the results will be anonymous or not.
• When collecting data, try to avoid taking advantage of easy-to-access groups simply because they are there (this is called “convenience sampling”). Data should be collected from those that most help us answer our questions.
• Be respectful of people’s time and when possible, compensate them for it.
• Be sure to protect the data you collect from people. Do not leave anything with personal information in a place that can easily be accessed by people who do not need to see the data (e.g. the back seat of your car). If possible, keep the information in a secure, or locked location.