What are your intentions with my data? A tool to enhance consumer data sovereignty in digital ecosystems

As data collection enhances, consumer data sovereignty becomes increasingly important. Despite initiatives like the GDPR, information asymmetries persist, and privacy policies remain complex or lengthy, often preventing consumers from giving truly informed consent for data sharing. Building on established concepts for more informed consent, we propose a tool—the consent registry—to enable informed consent and strengthen consumer data sovereignty while being easy to implement in a variety of digital ecosystems and applications. Our concept takes three different stakeholder groups into consideration, the consumer, the inquiring institution and the application provider, since often times the consumer is not directly connected to inquiring institutions and instead relies on third-party applications in digital ecosystems. Our tool employs case-to-case consent, describing that consent is valid only for a singular request. This empowers consumers to exercise informed control over data collection and usage while enhancing data availability across institutional borders in digital ecosystems.