It is election time in the UK. What should the political parties be putting in their manifestos? We think it would go something like this:
“The way our society currently collects and uses personal data is deeply unfair, often harmful, economically…
Often when we talk to organisations about a new personal data infrastructure we discover they’re labouring under a number of misapprehensions. The most common misapprehension is that if data is stored in an individual’s personal data store the organisation can no longer…
Microsoft Health Vault
We ask this question because the UK’s Treasury is asking it, to inform the development of a National Strategy for Data. If we get the answers wrong, we could spend many years in the doldrums. But if we get them right, huge new opportunities could be opened up.
Over the last year or so a buzz has grown up around the concept of ‘data trusts’. The OECD has begun work on designing and building data trusts. And in its recent paper on the economic value of data, the Treasury says the UK Government is “exploring data…
Sometimes, no matter how difficult it might seem, you just have to go back to basics. To solve a problem you have to go back to the root cause and deal with this root cause. And if you don’t, no matter what sticking plaster solutions you apply, the same old problems…
In its discussion paper on the Economic Value of Data the Treasury makes three observations about today’s data status quo:
Late in 2018 the UK’s Treasury published a discussion paper on the Economic Value of Data. The Paper commits the UK Government to holding “a wider set of conversations that government … over the coming year, as we develop a new National Data Strategy”.
If order-of-magnitude reductions in the cost of key resources transform societies and economies, where do these cost reductions come from?
A new resource with transformational potential; an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of making this resource available. What happens when these two things come together? Answer: the ways economies and societies work are reconfigured. And peoples’ daily lives are…
What’s the biggest obstacle to our society’s ability to unleash the full personal, social and economic potential of personal data?
In our experience, one of the prime candidates has to be the quest for ‘monetisation’. This isn’t just about the greed of…
Over the last 15 years, Governments around the world including the UK, along with many private sector firms, have poured huge amounts of time and money into attempts to solve the problem of online identity assurance (that is, making sure…
What is the one, single thing the UK Government could do to boost the operation and performance of the digital economy? In this blog, we explore the massive untapped potential of Verified Attributes.
The BBC reports today that web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is working on a technology and start-up to give people control over their data.
The BBC quotes Sir Tim as saying:
Implemented the right way, data portability could help address a structural flaw that’s constraining and distorting the workings of our current data economy. If the only entities able to collect and use personal data are large organisations, then…
Article 20 of the new General Data Protection Regulations creates a new right for citizens: the right to data portability. Rarely does one small clause in a massive piece of legislation strike at the very heart of the way the economy works, but this does.
When people talk about personal data, many quickly get ensnared by endless debates about consent: what it means, whether people really understand what they are consenting to, how best to give and get informed consent, and so on.
So far in this series, we have explained 1) that the biggest, most important issue about personal data is the one least talked about: the structural flaw at the heart of our system whereby individuals cannot gather, store or use their data for…
