Use cases
oConsent is early, so treat these as the shapes of problems it is built for, not shipped integrations. No partner logos, because there are no partners yet.
Proving consent to someone who does not trust you
A privacy officer who can produce a signed, timestamped, independently verifiable record is in a different position than one who can produce a screenshot of a log they control. When a regulator asks “show me this person agreed, on this date, to this purpose,” the answer becomes a check anyone can run rather than a document you wrote about yourself. This is the case the paper leads with: GDPR and CCPA give people rights, but the evidence of consent is still kept by the party that benefits from it.
Letting people see and take back what they agreed to
Most people have no idea what they have consented to, across how many services, for how long. Because each agreement names its purposes and validity window in plain fields, a person can read what is actually true and revoke any piece of it without filing a request and waiting on the company to honor it. Revocation is recorded the same verifiable way as the original yes.
Time-leased access that expires on its own
The paper describes granting temporary access that ends automatically rather than access that lingers until someone remembers to turn it off. A research group gets data for the length of a study. A vendor gets it for the term of a contract. When the window closes, the consent is expired on the record, not quietly still valid because nobody cleaned up.
Data sharing across more than one processor
Real data flows pass through several hands. Because agreements reference each other and each carries its own purposes and retention, a chain of processing can be expressed and checked at each hop instead of collapsing into one vague permission granted at the start.
A word on AI training
It is tempting to claim oConsent is plugged into the large model providers. It is not, and we will not pretend it is. The honest version: if you need to show that training data was collected with consent that someone can verify later, this is the kind of record built for that. Making it genuinely useful there is open work, and a good reason to get involved.