Data Traceability via OTrace Concepts and Implementation
Name
farooq-afarooq-meng-eecs-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
1.28 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dbde19c14d9a8cbad9c406a381abc6fb
Author(s)
Farooq, Ashar
Advisor(s)
Weitzner, Daniel
Date Issued
May 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Financial transactions are commonplace in the modern world. Everyday consumers make purchases on many e-commerce sites and often use many third-party financial services, such as to predict your credit score, to obtain customized budget recommendations, and to find out which specific loan is the best for them. These financial services often need financial information from the consumer, which is not always clear to the consumer. In other words, consumer data are being used without their knowledge and consent. The proposed solution of using a traceability protocol called OTrace aims to mitigate this issue of not knowing where a consumer’s data is along with what is being done with it. This paper will aim to bolster OTrace to be more representative of a protocol that consumers can actually use as a service, and financial institutions can have trust that this will solve the problem of consumers not knowing which third-party financial services have their data. In other words, this work will create a more general traceable and accountable data sharing system specification that includes the OTrace layer on top of an OAuth layer that will be complemented with a model deployment example. The addition of more relevant OTrace API endpoints corresponding to a new specification along with an entire new OTrace Web implementation along with analysis will guide the data traceability world, data privacy world, open banking world, financial world and ultimately the global world forward. There will be a model deployment of an OTrace service on top of an OAuth protocol that can allow everyone to see it being used by various parties that can ultimately scale up to fix the problem of unintended data usage and lack of transparency of location of data.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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