Patent ID: 7272582

Claim:
A method of handling electronic data, comprising: receiving non-aggregated data into a number of different records off-line on a data collection device; locking the data on the data collection device so that individual records are still repeatedly operable upon, including being readable and editable, but cannot be operated upon by analysis software to aggregate and analyze the data between different records without being unlocked; selecting data to be unlocked; determining a fee for handling the data based on a user controlled selection of a volume and a type of the selected data; receiving a number of keys to unlock the volume and the type of selected data, such that analysis software can operate on the different records to aggregate and analyze unlocked data between different records; unlocking data associated with the received number of keys; and executing analysis software that is not tied to and is not specifically compiled and associated with the selected and the unlocked data to analyze between and electronically aggregate results of the unlocked data between different records.