What You Need to Know about MyData
Who are we?
We are a global community establishing ourselves as an international nonprofit organisation to promote the ethical use of personal data.
What do we want?
A fairer digital society for all.
Some of the things we believe are essential to fairness are equality, respect, openness, and transparency across all different aspects of society.
What does personal data have to do with fairness or society?
A lot.
Personal data is like electricity: it powers companies and services available to you. It is also generated from you as you act and interact with digital services.
Like electricity, personal data is necessary for a digital society but it can be used for good purposes (like lighting your home) or bad purposes (like hurting someone with a taser).
In order to have a fair digital society, we need to make sure that personal data is used for good.
How do we do it?
Our aim is to demonstrate that in all aspects of society, ethical approaches to personal data should be and can be the most beneficial for all involved.
Think of ethical personal data handling like being environmentally conscious.
Today, we look for energy certificates on our washing machines and fair trade logos on our coffee packets. We turn off the lights when we’re not in the room and take a reusable bag to the grocery shop.
MyData works towards a tomorrow, when we seek to support individuals, companies, organisations, and governments who act ethically when it comes to personal data.
How can you help?
Learn: You can learn more about the thinking behind MyData in the white paper. You can watch videos from the MyData conferences on YouTube. You can listen to experts discuss their perspective on MyData as podcasts. You can follow us on Twitter & Facebook and subscribe to our newsletter.
Share: You can recommend this post to your communities, retweet us, and speak to your friends and colleagues about how they feel personal data should be handled.
Join: You can join the MyData community on our Slack team. You can meet us all in person when we meet in Helsinki at the 2018 MyData conference 29–31 August. You can be a founding member of the new nonprofit organisation at the founding meeting during the conference. You can join the local hub in your city, or found one yourself.
Contribute: You can submit your thoughts on personal data to this Medium publication. You can volunteer for the community and for the conference. You can join the nonprofit organisation. You can get in touch with us and suggest a way you would like to be a part of the movement of the future.
