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More privacy than ever

We are committed to strengthening privacy for citizens and businesses, thanks to personal data vaults.

More control and greater transparency

The Flemish Data Utility Company wants to be a reliable and neutral partner in building user-friendly and reliable services. It will focus on strengthening the privacy of citizens and companies, through personal data safes. A user-friendly and secure solution will be developed, which gives citizens a clear overview of their granted permissions for data sharing, with the possibility to easily withdraw them again.

Citizens and companies are experiencing a growing distrust in sharing data. More and more Flemish people explicitly indicate that the pre-eminence of privacy in service provision is an important reason for preferring one company over another. ​Transparency, overview and control play a major role in this respect.

When people trust their data will be used for their own benefit, they make it available in ways they simply couldn’t before.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor of the world wide web, CTO and co-founder of Inrupt

The advent of personal data vaults

The introduction of the new technology of personal data vaults, combined with a data lock, will allow citizens to choose which data to share with which organizations for which period of time.

The Flemish Data Utility will build a progressive and innovative platform of personal data vaults for this purpose. The system should give citizens and companies full control over the sharing of their personal data.

For this, Flanders is the first government to work with the data vaults of the Solid project of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (www). Ghent University and imec are also playing an important role in this collaboration.

All citizen data can be stored in the vault, regardless of where it comes from. The data is stored in a standardized format that all participants in the ecosystem can use. This allows the citizen to choose to share information with anyone in the ecosystem, and the recipient of the data can use it for the purpose intended by the citizen. For the citizen, this is all done through a simple and intuitive user interface.

By going for smart data services, we want to make data work together, while citizens and businesses keep control of their data, without having to share it openly.