We’re often asked why digi.me is designed to store data locally, rather than on our own servers, and the answer is as simple as it is complex – you owning and controlling your own aggregated data is the only solution that makes sense.
Privacy is the critical reason behind this, control, security and cost are others – but our whole business rationale is that gathering all your personal data securely in one place is vastly more valuable to each and every one of us than having it scattered around.
But crucially, it’s a decision based firmly in the reality of what is best for our users – so here’s the background behind our key reasons in a little more detail:
1) The privacy reasoning is relatively obvious – if you’re pulling everything about you into one big online library, you don’t want to leave the door open. As digi.me grows to become a full inventory of your life, covering all your social media updates and pictures as well as data from every area of your life including financial, health, purchase, travel and positional and even from the Internet of Things – would you really trust all of that to be held externally by one company?
Studies show that most of us have – rightly, given the continuing major upturn in hacks and security breaches – trust issues when businesses have a large proportion of a single area of that data, let alone all of it – so the obvious person to trust with it all is you.
As the owner, you store this data where you choose – digi.me never sees it and never stores a copy – and it’s yours to do what you want with. Cloud-based syncing with future releases will allow you to access this secure library of you from multiple devices, but you choose the cloud and your data is still encrypted within it. Whether you go with this option or solely local storage, we can’t see it, nor can anyone else.
2) Control is also important – if you’re in charge of your own data, then accessing it and deciding what happens with it is naturally your decision. A SAAS service will usually have terms and conditions (T&Cs) nominally placing you in control – but what happens if the company could no longer provide the service or if you wanted to take it elsewhere- could you actually do that in reality?
Your data today is held by many companies under terms governed by their T&Cs. Most allow you to retrieve your data yourself- and upcoming Data Protection acts (DPA), such as the new EU DPA, are making this an absolute right.
But because data – your information, often provided by you, about you – is so valuable, many of these companies such as Facebook and Twitter do not allow 3rd party companies to access and keep that data, even with your permission – they can access it but must then throw it away.
This is, of course, because your data is valuable to them, because they can sell it on and profit from it. They don’t want another company to hold that commodity as well – but digi.me overcomes that because you yourself gather the information after downloading our app, we do not do it for you. (Of course, this is another layer in how your data is kept private, as we have mentioned before, because we provide the means to get your data, not your personal information itself.)
3) Security is another major issue with SAAS companies – servers full of valuable data from millions of people that has a significant financial worth are a very attractive honeypot for hackers and criminals in general.
It takes time and money to bypass modern security protocols so it makes sense to target servers storing huge amounts of data rather than going after one person at a time. And, as recent breaches show, even huge multi-nationals have weaknesses that can be – and increasingly are – exposed.
4) And if a company does go above and beyond in their efforts to keep your data safe, such as by adding individual encryption, then you run into the final issue – cost.
If a 3rd party service is going to perform all the sync processing to retrieve your data, organise, store and manage it and then provide services on top then the cost associated with this as well as the relevant processing storage and bandwidth is substantial.
But each of these key issues is completely and emphatically overcome if you retrieve and process your own data locally or in a cloud of your choosing.
You get guaranteed privacy and control, because only you have your data. Because it’s yours, you can retrieve it from other companies and store it. Because it’s all in one place, it’s safer and by using resources you have already paid for you avoid extra cost.
Digi.me therefore, precisely because it is not SAAS, brings vast and ongoing benefits to the personal data economy and to each individual. Additionally, it puts you at the centre of your digital life and gives you the base layer of the Internet of Me, where the power of data becomes centered on the individual rather than being held elsewhere.