Get ready for individual bank accounts for your personal data.
There were significant privacy violations in 2017: DeepMind’s controversial data-sharing deal with the NHS; Facebook’s €110 million (£98m) fine; Google’s €2.4 billion fine; scammers selling personal data. We woke up to the idea that a few big companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and WeChat, had used our data to become near-monopolistic entities.
Private-data accounts are like individual bank accounts, but they contain personal information, not money. Hosted by data stores such as people.io, Cozy.io, digi.me and the Hub of All Things, of which I am the founder and chairman, many will let us legally own our own data, bringing it in and pushing it out as we wish, without our having to identify ourselves. And they will do this automatically or at the touch of a button. Inside these accounts, our data will become our asset, one to which we can give specific access rights in return for services. This will flip today’s internet (in which we give up all of this data in return for access to services) on its head.
A new generation of apps and websites will arise that use private-data accounts instead of conventional user accounts. Internet applications in 2018 will attach themselves to these, gaining access to a smart data account rich with privately held contextual information such as stress levels (combining sleep patterns, for example, with how busy a user’s calendar is) or motivation to exercise comparing historical exercise patterns to infer about the day ahead). All of this will be possible without the burden on the app supplier of undue sensitive data liability or any violation of consumers’ personal rights.
It will also be possible to gather future data. For example, organisations and governments will be able to offer benefits for future digital actions such as reducing energy use (future energy data), or taking more exercise (future Fitbit data). Assuming the data can be validated (and there are many blockchain applications ready to do this), the incentivisation of digital action fulfilled through data exchanges will create a internet capability that is as big as the invention of video streaming in the 90s.
Such incentivisation has always been possible at an app level. Fitbit encourages us to work towards our exercise goals. However, the game changer is that private-data accounts will allow this to happen across all data and all apps. New apps are already being built to leverage this new capability. Shape\Influence, a startup on the Hub of All Things’ private-data account, enables merchants to directly “buy” influence by offering benefits for tweets, posts and reviews (future data) from all of us, not just celebrities.
Paradoxically, the internet will become more private at a moment when we individuals begin to exchange more data. We will then wield a collective economic power that could make 2018 the year we rebalance the digital economy.
Read more at:
www.wired.co.uk/article/gdpr-personal-data-private-data-accounts
