Blockchain

Consent and Content Access Management LibrarySystem (Clam)
Privacy and data ownership is becoming very important for users, this is especially true for health data, where stricter regulations and increasing user awareness about the implication of data breaches or companies selling their data, make the implementation of new tools more complicated, making it clear that the existing paradigm of data handling does not work anymore. Blockchain technology is a promising solution to empower users to trust again in digital solutions by decentralizing the information from big companies, but there is a catch, web3 can be intimidating, developers need to learn a new way of working with the information along with several terms, like decentralization, smart contracts, IPFS, immutability, zero knowledge proof, transaction, mining… and the list grows. Due to this entry barrier, the misunderstanding of the core concepts could make an implementation defeat the main purpose of this technology, which is to decentralize the information from traditional databases and give the users the ownership of their data.

CLAM is the solution to this problem, it helps developers to focus on the implementation of their solution and not worry about technical details of two common cases when a system is built to handle sensitive data:

• Consent: Acquiring users' consent where they agree to share their delicate data is a challenge. With an anonymous, decentralized and immutable consent, the users’ enrollment increases by giving them the option to quit at any time they want, propagating the change to all linked systems without no effort.
• Content access management: the users’ can decide when and with whom the information is shared, everything is handled by smart contracts whose main purpose is to decentralize the logic and make the process transparent for all the stakeholders. The information is always encrypted and cannot be accessed by anyone except the user owner and those that she decided to share, who could be a doctor, researchers or any actor that the user trusts.