Government ‘Mydata’ strategy

 Today, the Government announces a new Consumer Empowerment strategy. Part of it is an initiative
designed to encourage companies to release personal data back to individuals in
a portable re-usable form so that they can, for example, employ third party
apps and services using the data to inform better purchasing decisions or
behaviour changes (e.g. ‘save more’ or ‘use less energy’).

 

In March, the Government organised a No. 10 Downing Street
Roundtable to discuss these ideas. I was one of the presenters at this
Roundtable. This is what I said:

 

Consumer Empowerment Roundtable, 15 March 2011

 

“I would like to
make two points about privacy.

 

 

First, if you
think about it, privacy is a personal setting. By definition.

 

 

Only the
individual knows what information he or she feels comfortable sharing, with
who, for what purposes, and in what contexts. So privacy as an organisational
setting – a blanket, top-down privacy policy set by the organisation is bound
to be unsatisfactory.

 

 

If privacy is a
personal setting, you need an input of information from the individual:
‘what privacy means to me’. To some degree or other, you need to empower the
individual with the ability to specify the rules of information sharing. This
is potentially transformational.

 

 

Second, when we
talk about privacy we are not just talking about a dislike of snooping or
intrusion or a fear of big brother. We are talking about control and personal
autonomy – respect for the individual – and value: the value of the information
and what it is being used for. So it is both psychologically and economically
important.

 

 

If we put these
two factors together – information from individuals about their needs
and preferences plus personal autonomy and economic value – we are looking at a
huge opportunity for innovation and growth. A new industry of
consumer-empowering services.

 

 

Information technology
is making this possible by transforming the ways individuals and organisations
interact. As a result, a new wave of Personal Information Management Services,
or PIMS, is emerging.

 

 

Some PIMS make the user the point of integration.
In financial services for example, services like Mint, Thrive, Yodlee and
moneyStrands are drawing together information from multiple different financial
accounts to help individuals get a full picture of their financial affairs, and
manage their money better. This principle of the user as the point of
integration has widespread potential in areas such as health, public services,
financial services, travel and so on.

 

 

Others PIMS are helping individuals research and make better
decisions: the whole explosion of price comparison, product and peer review
sites and so on – including new mobile phone based services such as TheFind and
Shop Savvy which help users compare prices while in store.  Like privacy, a better decision is a personal
setting – it reflects what my needs and priorities are right now.

 

 

Other PIMS help individuals manage their personal data
better. The new start-up Allow is helping consumers control spam and tell
marketers what they are interested in buying. Mydex, Google Health and
Microsoft HealthVault are all exploring different ways of helping individuals collect,
store, analyse and share the information they need to manage their lives
better, in ways that they can control.

 

 

Mydex, for
example, are currently live testing a revolutionary new ‘subscribe to me’
service where individuals store information they need to manage their own lives
on their own personal data store, and organisations request a subscription to
specific fields of this information – for example, postal and email address. If
the individual wants to have a relationship with this organisation, then every
time the individual updates the data in their own personal data store the
organisation is instantly and securely informed of this update, without the
individual having to log in to the organisations website, remember passwords
and so on.

 

 

By putting the
individual in control, this person- or citizen-centric approach to personal
data management builds trust and encourages trust-based information-sharing
between individuals and organisations. For example, by enabling individuals to
provide a range of different proofs of identity – 5, 7 or more – it shifts the
goalposts away from the quest for single ‘gold standard’ form of verification
that instantly becomes a target for fraudsters.

 

 

– Privacy as a
personal setting.

– The user as the
point of integration.

– Decision-making
as source of consumer value in its own right.

– The individual,
rather than the organisation, as the manager of personal data

– The individual,
rather than the organisation, as the relationship manager

– The individual
with a vested interest in managing his own identity and reputation

 

 

These are all
different aspects of personal information empowerment. And they all have one
thing in common. They point to a breakthrough in information logistics: getting
the right information to, and from, the right people at the right time.

 

 

Information
logistics is economic gold-dust because with it, product and service providers can
reduce guesswork and waste (i.e. improve operational efficiencies) and focus precious
resources on doing the right thing at the right time (effectiveness).

 

 

So: empowering
consumers with their own information has potentially significant economic
benefits both as a launch pad for new businesses and services – a source of
growth and innovation; a new industry perhaps – and as an opportunity for
existing companies to cut costs and improve service.

 

 

For this, we need
new infrastructure for these new types of information sharing along with the
development of new ‘information contracts’ between individuals and
organisations to allow for richer more trust-based information sharing.

 

 

There are many
people already making money in this space. But at the moment, the massive
economic potential of this market is only being dimly recognised, along with
its intimate connections to the future of privacy and identity assurance. With
the right initiatives the Government can provide significant impetus to this
emerging market without the need for significant changes to legislation or
regulation.

 

 

For more detail on the changing personal
data landscape click here. 
(available free to registered users).

 

 

Alan
Mitchell            
www.ctrl-shift.co.uk  Newsletter