Controlling Dataflows with a Bolt-on Data Escrow

Abstract

The data-driven economy has created tremendous value in our society. Individuals share their data with platforms in exchange for services such as search, social networks, and health recommendations. Platforms use the data to provide those services and create other revenue-generating opportunities, e.g., selling the data to data brokers. With the ever-expanding data economy comes the growing concern about potential data misuse. While most platforms give individuals certain control over their data (i.e., what data is being shared), individuals do not know how the data will be used once shared; they cannot control the purpose. In this paper, we introduce a data escrow design that permits individuals to observe all dataflows - not just what is shared but for what purpose. Rather than data flowing to the platform, the platform delegates their computation to the escrow, where individuals can observe and manage their data. To make the data escrow practical, we design and implement a prototype that works alongside the Apple ecosystem; specifically, we retrofit the Apple SDKs with a programming interface to enable delegated computation. Our solution does not depend on Apple's software and can be applied to other platforms, but building for Apple lets us study the main hypothesis of our work: whether such a data escrow solution is a feasible alternative to today's data governance. We show that our escrow prototype implementation is efficient, and we analyze the dataflows in real-world apps and show that the escrow's programming interface supports implementing a wide range of dataflows.