From Zero to Rich Personal Data with Ease, Security & Privacy
What if you could integrate with a single API, in minutes, to get Social, Financial, Health, Fitness and / or Music data with an individual’s consent and terms that work for you AND them?
What if that API had privacy and security built in at every level and put you in a great position to achieve GDPR compliance and keep your customers and their data safe and secure?
That’s a win, win, win! There are three winners in this scenario:
1. The individual: gets a copy of their data that they can reuse over and over to get more services and better experiences.
2. Your business / app: gets access to rich personal data in a private, secure and friendly way to build your experience or service.
3. Digi.me: as a tool / utility that makes all this possible and gets paid a nominal fee for doing so.
// What is so different about the digi.me approach?
For starters, most providers you integrate with (Facebook, Twitter, financial institutions, health providers, etc.) provide a single type of data — from their silo. There are various methods of gaining access to it (OAuth, SAML, proprietary), it comes in many flavors (JSON, XML) and is based on many standards and some proprietary formats.
Certain specialized data sets (like financial transactions) also come with complex legal agreements and up-front commitments on usage which can cost an arm and a leg to get started. Others require lengthy and costly due-diligence to prove that your methods of accessing, storing and exchanging this data are safe enough.
Digi.me has agreements and integrations in place to take care of getting data from these silos into the hands of individuals who have every right to it and an interest in reusing it across their lives. Digi.me takes care of creating and maintaining these complex integrations, securing the transactions and formatting the data into developer-friendly JSON backed by a vast ontology.
Digi.me is unlike these providers in that we DO NOT see, touch or hold the individual’s data! We merely help them connect to, get a copy of it and store it securely in a cloud location of their choice (Dropbox, Google Drive or One Drive at the time of this writing).
Digi.me also has a Consent Access API that gives apps a simple and easy way to request access to this data from an individual under any terms they find mutually beneficial.
This is done through a Consent Access Request and is based on a Consent Access Contract which spells out which data your app is requesting, over which period, what your app will and will not do with it, and so on.
When a user accepts your request, a Consent Receipt is generated and recorded and a session is created which allows your app to get exactly the data requested in a nice and friendly format.
The various providers that you could connect to directly usually have an interest in keeping this data in their silo and create terms and conditions that are prohibitive to a lot of uses that are advantageous to businesses and consumers.
Once the individual has a copy of their own data, you can request access to it under terms you and the individual find mutually agreeable.
// Who is it for?
The digi.me Consent Access platform is well suited for existing apps that want to add an element of personalization, want to replace an existing data source, or need access to more personal data as well as brand new apps and startups just getting off the ground.
// Who is using it, what can I do with it?
We are working with many bright and talented individuals, startups as well as established companies on various solutions. Here are just a few examples:
- digiPort is doing identity scoring and verification using various data sources such as social networks, financial and health records which can then be tied to the blockchain and used further down the line.
- VaxAbroad keeps consumers updated on what vaccinations they need to travel to different countries based on their health records.
- RetinaRisk is using people’s health data to calculate an individual’s percentage risk of developing sight-threatening retinopathy over time.
- Finsights is a personal financial analytics app that produces insights about how you are spending you money across multiple accounts.
We will be posting apps and links on our website as they become available so you can play with them yourself.
// Sounds great, what’s the catch?
The short answer is there really isn’t one.
Just like AWS, Google, Microsoft and others provide solutions you can use to build apps and not worry too much about scaling your app in the cloud, digi.me provides a solution that embeds privacy and security into a decentralized platform for getting access to rich personal data direct from individuals and charges a nominal fee.
// What does it cost to get started?
Nothing! Well, that’s not exactly right… It will cost you a bit of time (which is extremely valuable), but it just might be the future way you and your company choose to build apps. Given the current state of the personal data space, you owe it to yourself and your consumers to give it a look.
Our pricing model gives you a free way to get started and makes it easy to work into your own pricing strategy to keep this a win, win, win. Do you sell your app for $0.99 on the App Store? We can work with you. Are you a mega corporation with millions of users and grandiose plans? We can work with you too.
More info on pricing can be found here: http://digi.me/pp-pricing-revenue
// How do I get started?
Please visit: https://developers.digi.me for documentation and a sample app you can clone and run to get started. You will need to obtain an AppID to run the example.
Have a look at the API / SDK, join our Slack Workspace for developers and try our sample app. We hope you will like and embrace it, and by all means, let us know what you think and what we can do to improve!
// Life’s a journey, not a destination
A word about UX…
If you’ve been paying close attention, you will have noticed the individual needs a digi.me app to secure their data which is NOT stored with digi.me. They also need this app to approve Consent Requests as digi.me does not have access to their data.
The first set of apps being built on digi.me today are embracing this concept as they realize it is good for consumers to control and secure a copy of their own data.
We realize that you spend a lot of time perfecting your onboarding experience and want to minimize the number of clicks / taps necessary to get to the “aha moment” in your app. We want that too!
With this in mind and the win, win, win mentality mentioned earlier, we are working hard to create an experience that will result in the same number of clicks / taps in your app as if you did all of these integrations yourself and will not require the user to have the digi.me app before getting started!
In the experience we are developing, after the user comes through your flow, they will get an out-of-band option to become a permanent digi.me user. You can think of this like the PayPal guest checkout mode which eventually converted users into PayPal users so they can just sign in and approve transactions.
We look forward to working with you to create this experience as smooth as possible for everyone concerned.
See how easy it is to get started:
