Personal Data Usage Monitor (AJ): standardisation outlook

[PriitParmakson]

Andmejälgija (Personal Data Usage Monitor) is the Estonian solution to the problem of giving Citizen a report on how citizen's data has been used by the public sector.

Using a distributed storage and a standardised communication protocol, the personal data usage report is presented to Citizen on-demand.

The process is automated and strives to provide meaningful, specific and comprehensive data.

AJ is actually three things:

• a service - pilot deployment in 5 agencies is in process
• a software - open source, published in GitHub under MIT licence https://github.com/e-gov/AJ
• a protocol

Personal data usage, however, increasingly is cross-border. Personal data moves across member state borders. There has already been interest to Andmejälgija (Personal Data Usage Monitor) on international level.

Estonian solution is built on X-Road, the national data exchange network. However, the concept of Andmejälgija (Personal Data Usage Monitor) does not hang on any particular communication technology. Other countries may have different data exchange solutions.

Should there be interest to the Estonian AJ concept - and there already has been - it would be attractive to separate the AJ protocol into two sub-layers: a) a X-Road independent conceptual layer; b) technical layer. The first of the two can be developed into international standard and implemented by different countries. This way, future interoperability of cross-border personal data usage monitoring solutions would be guaranteed. Cross-border ambition, of course, can be bring personal data protection issues of its own. Standardisation process would be a proper forum to adress these possible issues in international co-operation.