Personal data stores in the UK

A personal data store is launched in UK. A user side personal information management service where individuals can keep a universal user centered account of their personal information records of their personal data, purchases, credit, health, insurance, home related information so they can track it as needed.

The service is currently on trials with the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions, and three local councils; London Borough of Brent, London Borough of Croydon, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. They present it as a free market solution to a privacy management issue by reversing the paradigm of the private information that companies and governments store about us, where the individual builds a personal data store and empowers, at will, companies and governments to access, after signing an agreement.

Additionally, organizations, government and providers can find and share information regarding individuals, but in a reversed balance scale – they have to approach individuals, sign an agreement.

It is a very interesting early-bird attempt to explore aspects of empowering a user centered approach and shifting power to users, by giving them control over their data. This project deals with hard core personal functional documents that we need to share with institutions in the functional areas.

This trial does not touch at all, at least at this stage, the very complex issue of monitoring personal data in our web based communications, searches for contextual exploitation by marketers for relevant ads and offerings, and touches only partially on commercial activities, it is very valuable as it makes several important statements in regard to personal information empowerment:

1. It shows that institutions can agree to the reversal of balance and that it can be implemented in providers’ culture. Commercial institutions will follow the steps of organizations in order to become part of the emerging ecosystems.


2. A good example of running trust based user side intermediary services for data management. It should definitely not be run by a corporate whose business model relies on income from 3rd party (advertising) but should be based on direct user based business models, like a bank.


3. It is a building block towards a new mindset for a reversal of power between providers and users. It will open people and organizations to realize that traditional corporate based paradigms will have to gradually adjust to user centered initiatives that will require a new kind of dialog between providers and users.


4. The new paradigm that sees the individual at the center where providers negotiate directly with the user permission to pull from the users’ side information and reward it accordingly will open up new business models around personal data usage in a permission based, mutual reward.


5. The efficiency demonstrated in such a trial in cost savings for multiple data saving schemes may eventually enhance corporate’ realization that the huge sums they invest in building client data bases in their siloed companies, can be replaced  by a competitions model where, even if they have to relinquish power, still all parties will gain.

I hope that together with initiatives like the project VRM - a vendor relationship management initiative, will serve as catalysts to build a mindshare towards a user centered web.

Author is an experienced business professional who is working on empowering user privacy and personalization. She is exploring Icentricity, a new paradigm to have Icentered a user centered web. You can get the required information about Icentricity through this article. For more information about personalization, User side paradigm, Attention economy, User centered, Social marketing you can visit - http://www.icentered.com/personal-data-stores-%E2%80%93-a-new-initiative-in-the-uk-for-user-side-personal-information-empowerment