A PILOT project which successfully set up the Island’s first data trust last year has “brought in a lot of attention from outside of Jersey” – and could have “economic value” for the Island in the future.
Computer scientist Dame Wendy Hall – a Digital Jersey non-executive director who was last year appointed to the United Nations’ high-level advisory body on artificial intelligence – explained that Jersey was well-positioned to lead the way in the world of data trusts due to the Island’s “autonomy”.
A data trust is a legal structure providing independent stewardship of data.
Dame Wendy said: “The interesting thing for me is that one can trial and experiment with things in Jersey that, in a way, I couldn’t do in the UK.
“You have a small island with 100,000 people and you have autonomy over most of your laws and regulatory environments – so what you do, how you handle data, and how you’ll handle AI and everything to do with the digital world, you have autonomy over. One can actually get to talk to people in government about these sorts of things quite directly.”
Last year, Digital Jersey successfully launched the Island’s first data trust.
LifeCycle saw data collected by cyclists in Jersey through special bike-light sensors.
This data was then used to assess the viability of using a trust structure to explore the concept of data stewardship.
The LifeCycle pilot project was the first time that a legally valid trust structure had been used to establish a data trust.
Dame Wendy said: “The concept of a data trust is that you put some data – it could be your personal data or data from an organisation that’s been collected from various places – and put it into a trust that looks after it for you.
“Not necessarily for a financial asset, but actually as a service that negotiates on your behalf what can happen to that data, who can use it, and what they can do with it.”
She explained that Jersey trust law lends itself to the creation of data trust as it is “softer” than UK trust law.
“It’s not less effective, but it’s less onerous on the trustees,” said Dame Wendy.
“Jersey has a big history of building things on its trust law, including the financial world, and we looked into it with the lawyers.
“So Digital Jersey funded this project to establish a data trust under Jersey trust law. It took about a year, but we did it.”
The computer scientist praised Jersey’s “track record of doing things that are ahead of their time, in a way that other people haven’t been able to do”.
Dame Wendy spoke about how the Island “forged its way ahead” in the world of financial trusts, and “grew its economy around that expertise and exported that”.
“I think we can do the same with the whole concept of data trusts,” she said.
The Digital Jersey non-executive director said that the success of the LifeCycle pilot project had “brought in a lot of attention from outside of Jersey, in particular in the UK, but other countries, too”.
Dame Wendy added: “I can’t talk much about the follow-up, but we’re currently talking to law firms and potential commercial customers for setting up data trusts in Jersey with their data – not personal data, this is commercial data.
“It could be a city centre, for a smart city – the idea would be that the trust would be hosted in Jersey, but the data would stay where it belongs, with the people that generate it.
“That’s where we are at the moment. It’s very exciting for me because we’ve done this proof of concept, and we’re now going through a phase where we can begin to show that it would have economic value – both the business of setting up data trusts and also for Jersey.”
