Data can be a powerful force for social progress, helping our most important institutions to improve how they serve their communities. As cities, hospitals, and transport systems find new ways to understand what people need from them, they’re unearthing opportunities to change how they work today and identifying exciting ideas for the future.
Data can only benefit society if it has society’s trust and confidence, and here we all face a challenge. Now that you can use data for so many more purposes, people aren’t just asking about who’s holding information and whether it’s being kept securely – they also want greater assurances about precisely what is being done with it.
In that context, auditability becomes an increasingly important virtue. Any well-built digital tool will already log how it uses data, and be able to show and justify those logs if challenged. But the more powerful and secure we can make that audit process, the easier it becomes to establish real confidence about how data is being used in practice.
Imagine a service that could give mathematical assurance about what is happening with each individual piece of personal data, without possibility of falsification or omission. Imagine the ability for the inner workings of that system to be checked in real-time, to ensure that data is only being used as it should be. Imagine that the infrastructure powering this was freely available as open source, so any organisation in the world could implement their own version if they wanted to.
The working title for this project is “Verifiable Data Audit”, and we’re really excited to share more details about what we’re planning to build!

Verifiable Data Audit for DeepMind Health

The technical challenges ahead

Building in the open

We’re hoping to be able to implement the first pieces of this later this year, and are planning to blog about our progress and the challenges we encounter as we go. We recognise this is really hard, and the toughest challenges are by no means the technical ones. We hope that by sharing our process and documenting our pitfalls openly, we’ll be able to partner with and get feedback from as many people as possible, and increase the chances of this kind of infrastructure being used more widely one day, within healthcare and maybe even beyond.