A Vision for Personal Data

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 inefficient and socially divisive — actively excluding citizens from direct participation and benefit in a fast-emerging digital economy. We need a radically new approach that builds safety, fairness, efficiency, equity and inclusivity in to how it works. This cannot be achieved simply by changing the policies existing ‘data controlling’ organisations adopt. It can only be achieved by the development of a new personal data digital infrastructure that actively empowers citizens with their data.

“To achieve this we will provide every citizen with their own self-sovereign personal data store that gives them the practical ability to safely and easily collect, store, share and use their own data under their own control for their own purposes, independently of their current relationships with any particular organisations. These Personal Data Stores will be free for citizens to use, designed to protect their privacy, and will provide them with easy-to-use tools to share and use their data under their control for their own benefit.

“In addition, we will provide every citizen with a digital data tool kit consisting of verified attributes (personal data) the government holds about them to get things done e.g. applying for benefits, employment, accessing services. We will require public sector organisations to provide citizens with secure tokens verifying these attributes so that citizens can use them to prove identity, prove entitlements and to eradicate the need for repeated form filling.

“Today’s personal data landscape is made up of isolated, moated ‘data castles’ where individuals’ data is held under lock and key by data controllers and used to pursue their purposes. Using this new, independent, neutral, enabling layer of personal data infrastructure we will turn it into the nation’s digital nervous system — a vibrant data sharing network — which pays for itself via the order-of-magnitude reductions in the costs of data processing that it enables for both organisations and individuals.

“The purposes of this new infrastructure should be to:

• To place individuals in control of their data with the practical ability to use this data to manage their day to day lives better
• To ensure and promote individuals’ data safety, security and privacy
• To make data use and sharing as easy as possible, reducing the costs, effort, risk and friction individuals experience when doing the above while also reducing the costs, efforts, risks and friction service providers incur when serving these individuals
• To help individuals build up new personal data assets that accumulate in richness and value over time and that work to their personal benefit
• To ensure that transactions and services that use personal data are intrinsically privacy protecting and trustworthy
• To help create a balanced data economy avoiding excessive concentrations of data and data power
• To encourage the innovation of new ‘person-centric’ services.

Design Principles

“In adopting this strategy we will build-in key design principles that ensure the new infrastructure continues to serve the interest of the nation’s citizens. These design principles include:

• Individuals’ Personal Data Stores should be individually encrypted with each individual holding their own key to their data store, so that only they can access it. This design principle has the added advantage that it avoids creating a big centralised database that becomes a target for hackers and fraudsters.
• Services providing these Personal Data Stores should be legally required to make the protection of individuals’ data their top priority.
• In line with current data protection regulations, services using individuals’ data should minimise the amount of data they hold with a structural separation of data collection and storage (with data held in individuals’ Personal Data Stores) and data use (by services accessing this data to provide particular services).
• These services should operate on a ‘zero-knowledge’ basis so that they are not able to see the data inside any individual’s Personal Data Store.
• Their business models and revenue streams should be designed so that they cannot profit from the monetisation of individuals’ data

We will organise extensive consultations to ensure the best possible implementation and application of the above principles.”