Lets Get Personal

We are hosting a Personal Data hackathon on October 7th and 8th in Reykjavik University, Iceland. You can register here to participate. Building solutions using personal data has been a pain given the walled gardens of the service provider’s databases. With the advent of new EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) a number of companies are starting to think about opening up their data to their customers. We thought it would be a good time to see what innovative solutions can be built if creative designers, developers and anyone interested in creating value with Personal Data got consented access to Financial, Health and Social Data.

So #LetsGetPersonal, using the Digi.me Consent Access platform and the unique Icelandic Health API, anyone can now build valuable mobile applications that delivers value to their customers. We think this is a game changer when everyone has access to their personal data and they can willingly share it with anyone else. A consumer now can vote with their feet i.e. share information about themselves to another provider without worrying about losing any of the service. The new rules around privacy and personal data portability is going to do to all personalization commerce what SIM card portability did to Mobile phone operators.

The Digi.me is unique because it enables what we call Private Sharing, i.e. anyone can share anything about themselves without losing their privacy as the sharing happens within the domain of the customer i.e their Mobile Phone. No data gets transferred out of the phone. Digi.me also the only personal data solution provider that does not see, touch or store your data in their infrastructure.

A typical use case or example of an innovative solution using Personal Data is a Credit Score Application, I bank with an Icelandic bank and I have been their customer since I moved to Iceland in 2006. They have all my historical information and when I need to increase my credit limit or apply for a Mortgage loan it is relatively simple for them to look at my credit rating by simply applying some logic to my historical data. Credit rating is not rocket science, there are only 3 parameters any credit institution looks at when considering an application

1. History of payments or if I have paid my loan payments on time
2. Current income or inflow into my bank account, do I have enough to pay the interest and principal of the loan
3. How much have I already borrowed and what is my outflow due to that and how much money do I have left over after I have paid all my bills

As I said, it is not rocket science. Today we have a convoluted way to solve this problem. We rely on Credit Rating Agencies and please do not let me get started about the Data breach in Equifax one of the credit rating agencies in the US. We rely on third parties to solve this problem. There are a number of reasons that I believe this is a broken system, for one it does not have a near realtime accessment of my financial health. The other problem that I have is it is a black box, I have no idea what criterias are being used by this 3rd party credit rating agency. Last but not least, I cannot shop for better terms for credit given my bank is probably the only one who has my current financial health score. What if I carried all my financial history with me on my phone which is encrypted and anyone can ask me permission to run a credit check on that data? The credit giver is not really interested in my financial history but only the score that gets generated based on the algorithm that is run on my phone. I would be happy to share this information to get better terms on my loan. It creates new service providers to compete for my business and it also leads to innovative solutions.

The above is what we want to enable. We are not only giving access to Personal Finance Data, we are also enabling the Health Data through the API that was developed by our partner and Sponsor of the Hackaton TM Software. This API is unique because it is the first of its kind in the world. Iceland is the only country in the world that has it in law that every citizen has a right to their personal health data. We released this API through the Digi.me application to a small beta user group and we will releasing it to a much larger group once all the security audits have been completed by the Directore of Health, Iceland. If you are Icelandic and want to be part of the beta group, you can sign up here. The health data that is available now is Prescriptions, Vaccinations, Medications, Doctor appointments, Hospital visits and medication that was administered during the Hospital visit. All measurement data like Blood Pressure, Blood Sugar, Height, Weight etc will be available shortly. I just attended a very interesting conference in Iceland called Who wants to Live Forever organzied by the Icelandic Health Symposium. All professionals and participants in the event really want to learn more about how they can get their health data and the professionals so want to enable their patients to be involved in the healthcare process, and by providing everyone with their health data we facilitate that. We believe we can decrease the healthcare cost and increase the actual personlized care by involving the patient in the process. Interesting solutions can be built once the health data is available to the innovators.

Last but not least, all our social data is also made available through the Digi.me Consent Access Platform. All the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest posts, photos, connections etc are now available to everyone who has an account. One of the pet peeves of mine which led me to Digi.me was the fact that none of us have access to or copy of our social data. I think it is important for us to have a copy of the data. I have written about this problem before and I think it is only getting worse.

Can we build useful solutions if entrepreneurs, startups and innovators had access to your social graph? and those innovators, startups or innovators did not have to get the permission of Facebook but you, their customer to get access to your data would that be useful? I think so, here is a simple use case of Personalisation, I work with a number of startups and the first challenge for them to work with a small group of Angel customers to nail their Product to Market fit, most of personalization done by startups now is by asking their customer to enter personal data, I think this is a failed model. The simpler solution would be to get the consent of the customer programmatically and get to see their social graph and personalise the customer’s experience. Again, since it is private sharing it does not make my social data to be shared or distributed to other platforms or startup databases. I believe strongly that startups that build their solutions ontop of other networks have a better chance of distribution and personlization.

We are going to have some interesting prizes, rewards and recognition. We know that is not why teams participate in hackathons, it is to be challenged, to learn and collaborate and share their knowledge. All the prizes are experiential and the challenges are non-trival. Are you interested to change how we use Personal Data? Do you want to come to Iceland? here is your chance, Sign up and participate. It is going to be a fun experience.