Good Practices: How does the EU-funded smashHit project support traceability?

smashHit project produced with its partners a traceability component, which provides an end-to-end data use traceability infrastructure. The component allows data owners and providers to trace their data and to retrieve data logs of the processing pipeline of specific datasets.

The objective of smashHit is to assure trusted and secure sharing of data streams from both personal and industrial platforms, needed to build sectorial and cross-sectorial services, by establishing a Framework for processing of data subject consent and legal rules and effective contracting, as well as joint security and privacy preserving mechanisms.
The vision of smashHit is to overcome obstacles in the rapidly growing Data Economy which is characterized by heterogeneous technical designs and proprietary implementations, locking business opportunities due to the inconsistent consent and legal rules among different data-sharing platforms actors and operators. The Framework provides methods and tools, such as the smashHit Platform.
How does smashHit support traceability? Enabling Data Use Traceability with smashHit

The project has developed a traceability component, which provides an end-to-end data use traceability infrastructure. The component allows data owners and providers to trace their data and to retrieve data logs of the processing pipeline of specific datasets. To support this, the project uses metadata to indicate a data transfer and to log each data transaction.

In addition, with the help of digital signatures for authentication purposes, the traceability component ensures the integrity of both data and the processing related to it. The project’s traceability component consists of a traceability manager and a traceability module. The traceability manager gathers the logs of all individual companies and offers a single-entry point. The traceability module, which needs to be deployed to every data provider/processor, supplies an interface for logging data transfers and verifications. smashHit’s data use traceability infrastructure tackles various privacy concerns of data owners and supports GDPR compliance.

Learn more about the smashHit project in its Project factsheet

Original Post: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/how-does-eu-funded-smashhit-project-support-traceability