We have spent considerable time educating and convincing various public and private organisations of the financial, compliance and marketing advantage of allowing individuals to manage their personal information “under their control, with their consent, for their benefit” but it took the Financial sector meltdown in 2008 and a change of government to realise the importance of Trust in any relationship.

I feel now that we are at a tipping point and that our patience and tenacity, not least from our shareholders, is about to pay off.

In recent times PAOGA has been recognised as a major player in this emerging market by international organisations including; VRM, PDEC, Respect, OIX and Privacy by Design. We have also been invited to participate in government initiatives including; Identity Assurance (Cabinet Office) and midata (BIS).

PAOGA is a founder of The Privacy Partnership, comprising PAOGA, Formscan and TrustID, and we have recently been invited by BIS, as one of three Personal Data Store providers, to participate in the midata Innovation Laboratory with a very select group of public and private organisations to develop the midata program. The objective is to provide individuals with access to personal information which is currently held in numerous data silos. This will enable us to download, synchronise, check, correct if necessary, and share with other organisations that we chose to enter into a relationship.

The initial populating our secure Personal Data Stores is a key challenge with data in various formats and in various locations. It has to be easy and it has to be quick but, once done, the benefits of cost and convenience for individuals and organisations will be significant.

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I repeat some interesting quotes from the letter:

• “If you think Google’s privacy policy has any bearing on privacy you’re barking up the wrong tree”
• “Google lives in the real world – not in the world of fantasy privacy policies.”
• “. . . you cheerfully allow the US government and us to trample all over your citizens privacy.”
• “Had you not hit us with a $22.5 million fine we wouldn’t even need to monetize data as much as we do to make up for the seven hours of lost profit you imposed on us.”
• “And we achieve all this without paying the required amount of tax in places like the UK. That means we can make more profit and thus help fundamental human rights even more.”

I suggest you read the full text to understand the context of these quotes at The Privacy Surgeon, Simon Davies.

As you know, PAOGA is a strong defender of the rights of the individual to protect their privacy and for companies to protect their confidential information. We are also concerned that bureaucracy, red tape and unnecessary legislation can be counter-productive and inefficient, adding disproportionately to the cost of serving ‘consumers’, costs which are then passed on to the consumers by way of price rises.

Our solution is to provide the tools to allow individuals to control the levels of privacy over their personal information and for companies to protect their confidential information.

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Some of the Respect Network Founding Partners – Nov 2012

PAOGA are keen to collaborate and work with the community of like minded companies who recognise the benefits of user driven data stores to the individual, in their many roles, and their trusted suppliers of goods and services. We are particularly concerned with addressing the issues of individual privacy and business confidentiality which have been seriously compromised.

Confidence depends upon trust and, as citizens, consumers, patients, employees, students etc., we are continually disappointed by the cavalier attitude that organisations, public and private, treat and protect our personal data. The solution is for the concerned individual to take control of their personal data and to manage the sharing of relevant information with suppliers that have earned their trust. We are developing the platforms and tools to enable individuals to build, manage and share their personal information ‘under their control, with their consent, for their benefit’.

Just in case you still need convincing have a look at #3 on Gartner’s list of Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2013.

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One of the concerns that individuals and organisations raise is included in the article.

There is a risk that if data lockers prove as useful as the start-ups claim, it could encourage bigger cloud-storage firms such as Google and Dropbox to barge in and grab their customers. Another danger is that locker users are tricked by disreputable companies or data thieves into exposing the masses of personal information in them, triggering a public backlash.

What the article doesn’t recognise is that PAOGA has focussed on the security aspects of Personal Lockers to ensure that access to their personal information is secure and that only relevant information is revealed under their control. Even the level of security for each transaction or document is uniquely encrypted so no-one can ‘barge in and grab’ anything unless the data owner allows them.

Think of a PAOGA personal data store as an individual’s Safe Deposit Box vault with each box    requiring both the owners and the recipients unique encryption keys.

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But I didn’t realise until my son sent me the link to this news clip that even those paper documents which we all copy, as individuals and businesses, are a gift to the global black market in illicit data trading.

Take 5 minutes and watch this.

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It is the Foreword to an important White Paper Privacy by Design and the Emerging Personal Data Ecosystem  from Dr Ann Cavoukian, Information & Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada which I strongly recommend reading.

Yes, Personal.com can be seen as a competitor of PAOGA but, as I have often said, at this point of this emerging and important global market, there are no competitors – only allies who share a worthwhile vision and mission to bring confidence and trust back to online interactions for all participants; including you, as a citizen, consumer, employee, student, patient et al. We also work with Respect Network, OIX, Ctrl-Shift (World Economic Forum), Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, all of whom are developing standards to facilitate collaboration and interoperability.

Foreword

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous line from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” – “water, water everywhere … nor any drop to drink” – could easily be updated for the 21st century when it comes to the state of data about people and our lives: “Data, data everywhere, but not a bit (or byte) for me.” Simply put, our data is everywhere, yet there is no place where we can easily find or use it.

How is this possible, when we live in a Big Data world where the data we create or that is captured about us grows at an exponential rate that exceeds Moore’s Law? Just about everything that we do – from mundane form filling to using the latest mobile devices and apps – generates data. Companies certainly understand the importance of our data and capture it for their own use, mining value from it every day. Even so, they struggle to make sense of it all, hoarding it in silos that, ironically, greatly limit its ability to be used.

Now, imagine breaking down these silos, liberating the data, and bringing it together in a secure place where a person could easily access this information and decide how best to use and share it. Then imagine letting the smartest developers build apps on top of such permission-based data, so that people could harness its power to radically improve their lives, on their own terms. The potential use cases are as unlimited as the data the person might store in his or her vault and the personal, private networks they will wish to create when they push their data into the world beyond their vault.

For example, analyzing information about our own purchases, payments and habits could make us smarter financially. Mashing together health records with dietary and exercise tracking could make us healthier. We could use our information to signal purchase intent directly to retailers, earning us better offers and allowing our favorite stores to create more satisfying and welcoming relationships with us. From a productivity perspective, we could use the data in our vault to literally make form filling obsolete and reclaim tens of billions of wasted hours annually across the globe.

There is no need to imagine such services. Technology makes such opportunities possible. Only inertia and certain business practices stand in the way.

A new personal data sector is taking root and creating user-centric, user-driven tools to give individuals more control over their own data. Start-ups focusing on personal data vaults and the safe, private exchange of data form a vibrant core of this industry. As evidenced by the World Economic Forum’s May 2012 Rethinking Personal Data project report, the largest companies in the world as well as governments have become keenly interested in this sector.

Putting users at the center and in control of their own data is not new, but it is an idea whose time has come. This is partly because the current path, as the World Economic Forum report highlights, is inherently unsustainable.

More than ever before, the privacy and security practices of companies and governments are front-page news, and regulators and politicians are scrutinizing them closely. Seeing the well-publicized triumphs and tribulations of the largest search engines and social networks, people are starting to wake up and ask tough questions about privacy, transparency, security, and why they lack the power to use and benefit from their most personal of assets – information about themselves and the people, places, things and activities in their lives. Companies have also

begun to realize that today’s online advertising model is dysfunctional, inefficient

and alienates the customers and dollars they wish to attract and retain.

Personal sits in the center of this emerging personal data ecosystem. We are the first commercially available platform to give individuals the ability to securely import, store, share and reuse all the important data, notes and files in their lives through a vault and personal network connecting them to trusted people, organizations and apps. An end-to-end solution for personal data, Personal is simultaneously the vault and network of nodes that allows people to share and benefit from their data however they choose. Other companies are emerging in this space, focusing on all parts of the personal data spectrum – data vaults, networks, identity management, and other areas. We can barely imagine all of the amazing benefits that will come from this user-centric data world, and we are excited to help make it a reality.

If this new sector is to succeed and gain user trust, the companies in it must adopt Privacy by Design (PbD) principles in their technology and business practices, as described in this paper. And I can think of no better or more esteemed authority to author this study than Dr. Ann Cavoukian and her team. Dr. Cavoukian’s coinage of PbD and long record of leadership on privacy as a scholar, advocate and regulator are renowned and well deserved.

The result of their work is a pioneering examination of the opportunities and challenges of the personal data ecosystem. The paper serves to put sharper edges around this emerging category, and I believe it provides a lasting and important intellectual cornerstone for its development. I think you will agree.

Shane Green
Co-Founder and CEO, Personal

I certainly agree Shane and hope that you can join us at The Prospect of Whitby next time.

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This concurs with a recent survey by Which? who asked consumers the extent that they trusted various professions to ‘act in their best interest’. Estate Agents and Bankers scored 11% after Politicians and Journalists with 7%. Doctors and Nurses were up at 80%+

A key point he made was that there is no compulsion for Estate Agents to belong to a professional or trade body. It occurred to me that these professional and trade institutions, such as RICS, could do much to enhance the ‘trustworthiness’ of their members, and therefore the profession or trade they represent, by participating in the governments’ ID Assurance initiative to ensure that their members and their qualifications are verified and, under CPD, maintained. This would provide consumers with confidence and weed out the minority ‘cowboys’ who give numerous professions a bad name – often undeserved.

Relationships, of any kind, depend upon Trust and Trust is something that is earned and maintained. In business ‘More Trust = More Money’.

To be trusted is a valuable and powerful asset for individuals, businesses and government and trust is under severe pressure at the moment with front page revelations undermining the trust of politicians, military, police, lawyers, bankers, doctors, teachers, media and celebrities. In business the cavalier attitude to the protection and maintenance of personal information or worse, the unauthorised sharing or sale of personal information (online and offline), has shaken the confidence of individuals in their multiple roles as citizens, customers, patients, employees etc.

The digital world is still very young but, as Tim Berners-Lee has said, the internet is being used for communications and transactions undreamt of when he developed it. Who would have thought that your personal information (not just identity but bank details, academic qualifications, medical information etc.) is, on average, stored in 1,000 data silos around the world? Who would have thought that not only are all your emails scanned but also attachments in the name of anti-terrorism?

We all enjoy the convenience of online but ask someone about ‘convenience’ who has had their identity compromised or found that their creditworthiness has been trashed due to data errors when they have taken 2 years to re-establish their credibility.

We are only just learning that Social Networking needs to be used appropriately. You should treat it like a party of friends and strangers and only reveal ‘stuff’ that you would say in such circumstances. For those other occasions when you want some personal privacy or business confidentiality we need Anti-Social Networking. We need to have the online tools and services to know for certain; who we are communicating with, that we have shared something important with them, that they received it and that it is private and confidential.

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I look forward to the outcome of this research.

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