Ownership and Flow Primitives for Scalable Consent Management in Digital Public Infrastructures

Abstract: Digital public infrastructures (DPIs) represent networks of open technology standards, applications, services, and digital assets made available for the public good. One of the key challenges in DPI design is to resolve complex issues of consent, scaled over large populations. While the primary objective of consent management is to empower the data owner, ownership itself can come with variegated morphological forms with different implications over consent. Questions of ownership in a public space also have several nuances where individual autonomy needs to be balanced with public well-being and national sovereignty. This requires consent management to be compliant with applicable regulations for data sharing. This paper addresses the question of representing modes of ownership of digital assets and their corresponding implications for consensual data flows in a DPI. It proposes a set of foundational abstractions to represent them. Our proposed architecture responds to the growing need for transparent, secure, and user-centric consent management within Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Incorporating a formalised data ownership model enables end-to-end traceability of consent, fine-grained control over data sharing, and alignment with evolving legal and regulatory frameworks.