Next-Gen Digital Consent: Sequential, Contextual & Scalable

Next-Generation Digital Consent: Beyond All-or-Nothing

In the physical world, data sharing is contextual and sequential: a plumber fixes your sink and, if there’s good rapport, you might share some personal details—but if red flags arise, you don’t reveal anything. In the digital world, we often sign away our rights all at once, repeatedly, without reading contracts.

Conceived during client explorations in pharmaceutical clinical trial recruitment and prototyped in the Trustchain project, UST has designed a next-generation consent mechanism that:

1. Treats digital consent as partial, context-dependent, sequential, and case-by-case.

2. Decouples consent from data transmission, allowing the right to release data to a processor to be managed separately from the actual data transfer. This overcomes the scaling failures of monolithic “common data platforms” that try to manage both simultaneously and fail due to heterogeneity, governance, or operational complexity.

The system is research-backed (TrustChain)and resilient to scaling, and we are now seeking partners to expand and apply this approach across sectors.