Europe’s impending General Data Protection Regulation is not a cheery topic for most companies. Griping about government overreach may seem like the appropriate pro-enterprise, pro-tech response, but compliance may have happy side effects for data visibility, sharing and monetization.

“There’s a groundswell movement called digital sovereignty as a response to GDPR in Europe,” said Valentin Bercovici (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of PencilDATA.

Individuals are realizing that their data, “digital exhaust” and “digital footprint” belong to them. The populace is wisely questioning the centralization of data by entities like Facebook and Google, according to Bercovici.

“It’s a movement that I believe now has political strength to actually migrate across the pond over here, as well,” he said.

PencilDATA is a two-month-old software-as-a-service startup embracing data governance. It allows users to see and manipulate data easily, according to Bercovici. It achieves this with a blockchain ledger that accounts for all data activity, he told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during an interview at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio in California. This makes using data much more lucid within companies and in business-to-consumer relations, he explained.

GDPR and goodies

“If you don’t know who’s doing what to your data, you’re far less likely to share it,” Bercovici said. An immutable blockchain with an audit trail and strong authentication of who is doing what with data renders that knowledge.

Within companies, departments that do not typically trust one another can selectively share data. Use cases in healthcare and life sciences make selectively sharing sensitive patient data possible, Bercovici  pointed out.

And what of that big, ugly GDPR data breach fine of four percent yearly revenue per incident? If a consumer exercises the Right to be Forgotten, a business has 24 hours to nix all his or her data, Bercovici stated. PencilDATA’s “kill switch” allows companies to comply in minutes or seconds. No scouring databases or deleting selected records is necessary.

The “kill switch” illustrates what complete data sovereignty is all about, Bercovici believes. “You can’t really value an asset until you fully control it,” he said. “You can’t control something until you can take it back.”

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Photo: SiliconANGLE