I Want My Personal Data Back!
By: Jules Goddard
Tags: Distributed Systems, Data Science, Decentralization, Programming, Blockchain

I Want My Personal Data Back!

It’s time to transfer the control of personal data from organisations to people.

Photo by Claire Proud on Unsplash retouched by the author

Summary

In today’s world, our personal data is usually stored and controlled by organisations.

In tomorrow’s world, personal data will be stored and controlled by its owners, us.

Discussion

What is personal data?

It’s our email address, telephone numbers, home address, bank account details, location, preferred hot drink, basically any data pertaining to us.

Who owns our personal data?

We do.

Where is our personal data stored, and who controls it?

In today’s world, our personal data is usually stored and controlled by organisations:

Personal data is stored and controlled by organisations (dotted zone)

Traditionally, the control of our personal data derived from where it was stored. See “Personal Data Storage Location” by the author for a discussion about personal data storage locations.

What is wrong with that?

Almost everything we do online or offline requires us to supply personal data

We have become accustomed to sharing our personal data without considering or even understanding the consequences

Few of us have a clear picture of how far our personal data is spread throughout the world

Our online personal data footprint is continually increasing, exposing us to increasing risk of data abuse

We have ineffectual control of our shared personal data and must often rely on data protection regulations to reduce the risk of data abuse

How will that affect us?

Over time, this repeated and increasing sharing of our personal data raises the risk of:

loss of our autonomy

loss of our privacy

damage to our reputation

adversely affecting our finances

theft of our identity

What can we do about it?

In tomorrow’s world, our personal data will be stored and controlled by its owners, us:

Personal data will be stored and controlled by its owners

This will probably be encapsulated by a Web 3.0 principle that we need secure, trust-less, distributed services, such as blockchains and storage.

How do we do that?

We need an open, distributed platform designed to encourage self-sovereign identity and data ownership. It must enable any data, held on any storage device, to be shared in a controlled way with other people or organisations.

The platform should be as general purpose as possible, allowing developers to integrate it into existing applications and to explore entirely new fields of data sharing.

People and organisations need applications that easily create smart contracts that share our personal data.

Conclusion

Permitting organisations to store and control our personal data has proven to be risky, as borne out by continuous reports of malpractice in the press.

Additionally, personal data regulation (such as GDPR) compliancy is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive for organisations. Ultimately, these are costs that will be borne by us.

Storing personal data in a distributed manner controlled by our smart contracts, provides organisations with high personal data regulation compliance, and us with good control of our personal data.

It’s time to transfer the control of personal data from organisations to people.

Bio

Jules Goddard is a founder of Datona Labs, who provide smart contracts to protect your digital information from abuse.

website — twitter — discord — GitHub

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