The future of social Is personal: the potential of the Personal Data Store

Daniele Miorandi, Vincenzo Maltese, Michael Rovatsos, Anton Nijholt & James Stewart (ed.), Social Collective Intelligence: Combining the Powers of Humans and Machines to Build a Smarter Society, 125-158

2014

Co-authors: Max Van Kleek

Themes: Computing/The Internet, Privacy

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSs), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges.

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