From OUOU to MUMU: why the real information age hasn’t even started yet

It’s a commonplace nowadays that we live in an information age where society and the economy is increasingly driven by data. All you need for evidence of this is to look at the likes of Google and Facebook, companies that have embedded themselves into billions of peoples’ everyday lives. Or take a look at the increasingly fractious debate about who should be allowed to collect what data, how, for what purposes and whose benefit.

But actually we’re just at the beginning. At the very earliest stage. Why? Because the way that data is currently collected and used suffocates its true potential.

The unique and special thing about data is that it doesn’t get ‘used up’ when it is used. It can be used again and again. And it can be used by different people for different purposes. Your health data may be used by a doctor to help treat an illness for example, and by an insurance company to calculate your insurance premiums. You may use the data in your driving licence to prove that you are entitled to drive. A separate organisation may use it to help verify your identity.

Currently our entire data economy is organised around the assumptions of ‘OUOU’: that there is only One User of any piece of data that has been collected (the first ‘OU”) and there is only One Use for this data — the purpose they collected the data for (the second ‘OU’ of ‘one use’). This data system is almost 100% organisation-centric. It is organisations that collect and use data and they only use this data for their own purposes, jealousy guarding the data they collect, partly because for legal reasons if it is personal data, but also because they see this data as keys to their competitive edge and ability to make money.

From ‘OUOU’ to ‘MUMU’

Increasingly however, a new realisation is dawning: that data that was originally collected and used by a specific data controller for a specific purpose could be used by many other parties for many other purposes. As long as we live in an OUOU world the full potential of data can never be unleashed, because most users, and uses, of this data can never happen.

To unleash this potential, we need to move from OUOU to MUMU — many users, many uses.

Like the chick in the egg at a certain point the OUOU structures and assumptions that originally protected and nurtured data collection and use begin to constrain and suffocate it. For the data chick’s potential to be unleashed it has to break out of the OUOU shell to embrace MUMU instead.

You can see the MUMU trend everywhere we look, in issues relating to both personal and non-personal data. For example, the new European Strategy for Data has provisions to improve and increase data sharing between the public sector and business (government-to-business or G2B data sharing), between companies (business-to-business or B2B data-sharing), between businesses and government authorities (business-to-government or B2G data sharing), and between public authorities. It is developing strategies for increased data sharing in targeted industries such as automotive, financial services, health and Internet of Things.

Of course, citizen’s right to data portability is now enshrined in law via GDPR. Data sharing in one form or another is also an essential element of multiple initiatives including those to promote availability of Open Data, attempts to promote Open Banking and hot topics including so-called ‘Big Data’, AI, internet of things, smart cities and smart homes.

This shift from OUOU to MUMU represents a tectonic shift in the data economy. Its unfolding may be slow but it is also fundamental, structural, remorseless, relentless and unstoppable. the potential uses of data. And the more the idea ‘clicks’ in peoples’ minds (e.g. policy makers, regulators, innovators, entrepreneurs, opinion-formers as well as people like ourselves) the more unstoppable the pressure for MUMU becomes.

Looking back, once MUMU ways of collecting and using data have become the new normal, what we currently call ‘the ‘information age’ will seem extremely restricted, distorted and partial indeed, just as the age of steam seems extremely limited once viewed from the vantage point of an electrified society.

In their time, steam engines were dazzling and awe-inspiring in their operation, scale and impact; widely seen as harbingers, symbols and catalysts of dramatic and far-reaching change. But ultimately, steam was a dead-end. When it was replaced by electricity — a far richer, more flexible, versatile, efficient, distributed way of accessing and using energy, economic growth really took off.

Companies like Google and Facebook are the steam engines of the information age. They, too, are dazzling and awe-inspiring in their operation, scale and impact. But their OUOU nature means they don’t represent the MUMU future.

Multiple effects

MUMU will (is already having) multiple effects. Here are some of them.

• A growing increasing realisation that data storage needs to be separated from data use, with specialist organisations and institutions enabling the gathering, aggregation and storing data and helping specialist service providers access and use it for specific purposes. A central plank of the EU’s new data strategy for example is to “increase its pools of quality data available for use and re- use.” This is part of what it calls “a new data paradigm where less data will be stored in data centres, and more data will be spread in a pervasive way closer to the user ‘at the edge’ ”. Mydex is one of these specialist organisations.
• The increasing importance of new mechanisms and enablers of safe, efficient data sharing. Well-formed APIs are an obvious example. They can help to turn a system of isolated data castles into a vibrant, pulsating nervous system driven by data sharing. But the development of new standards for the creation and use of metadata is also critically important along with data directories that act as signposts to where the data is held, and data inventories explaining what data is held by each party.
• New forms of value and business model to go with these new approaches.
• The collapse current notions of ‘private property’ which are of absolutist, binary, where something is either mine or yours. In its place: increased recognition of the importance of shared and divided rights and responsibilities with negotiated boundaries and limits.
• Changes in value equations. Currently, in consumer/citizen facing services, the only value that matters relates to the content and quality of the service offered by a service provider. With the rise of MUMU, organisations will be increasingly expected to offer an added dimension of value: data. Citizens/customers will increasingly ask “what data has the service provider collected, generated or minted that I could use for other purposes elsewhere, outside of this relationship, with other parties?”

New dangers

The shift to MUMU won’t automatically usher in a new golden age of data sharing and use. Far from it. Predatory, parasitic and profiteering motives and strategies are likely to be inflamed even further, triggering new data land grabs that are even bigger, more vicious and more cynical than those we have yet seen. Sharks and opportunists will adopt ‘caring, sharing’ words to cover the real intentions. One example: Look at how new health data sets are being collated supposedly for the purpose of helping society tackle Covid-19, but actually represent power grabs and data monetisation. Beware also the new fashion for ‘data trusts’ which are already being eyed by some as a data land grab opportunity.

But also new opportunities

The existence of such threats makes Mydex’s work work even more important. We saw MUMU coming when we first launched 13 years ago. Everything we have done since has been designed to enable data sharing — to help MUMU happen in the realms of personal data — but only if it is safe and ethical, empowers citizens and ensures they realise the value of their own data. (That was our original slogan on formation: “helping individuals realise the value of their own data”.)

We’re getting closer to making it happen. With the work we have done for the Scottish Government on its ‘Smart Entitlement’ strategy we believe we have found a practical, doable way forward that achieves the goals of safety, efficiency and equity, and that helps unleash the full value of personal data for both individuals and the broader society and economy.

More on that soon.