The very concept of online privacy is often described as a myth, and while it’s not hard to see why, it’s more wrong now than it has ever been.
Yes, our personal data is scattered about the web, traded, sold on and held in multiple places that we can neither access nor delete – but the dominance of that situation will soon be the past, with the glorious forces of the Internet of Me riding in to replace it.
The IoM will enable all of us, no matter who we are, to take back control of our data and shape what happens to it and who is allowed to see it.
We don’t benefit from our data being traded at the moment, but the Internet of Me will flip that so that we are the primary beneficiaries, sharing that data on our own terms only when we are happy with what is offered in return.
And businesses win too, finally getting access to data that is 100 per cent accurate and rich in both depth and time – just what innovation needs. And society needs innovation, especially in areas such as health where a mass of accurate data can be hard to obtain.
Of course, online privacy has always been fluid when set against the norms of the offline world.
But the last decade has also seen personal perceptions of privacy change and evolve dramatically with the explosion in online services and social networks on which many of us regularly post huge amounts of personal information.
So how does all of this combine to create a more private world? The simple answer is technology, more specifically digi.me and other application advances that mean processing can be brought to the data, instead of data always having to be handed over.
At the very heart of the digi.me vision is the abilty for each individual having their data in a 100 per cent secure and private library under their control that we, the company, can never see, touch nor hold.
But the arrival soon of our Consented Access platform means you will be able to share your data with a company without it ever leaving your handset, as they can give permission for an app to simply run an algorithm over your data, which returns only the results and means the data never leaves your device.
More sharing, AND greater privacy for your data, is a pretty spectacular combination. And in addition to being more private, this body of data you collect through digi.me- which will shortly include financials and health – creates a body of information that is immensely more powerful than the sum of the parts scattered before this aggregation.
Incoming legislation called the GDPR will also shape this brave new world, creating much more user-centric stringent regulations on the collection of use of personal data, as well as substantial fines for non-compliance.
So privacy online becomes more about choice, with us as the guardians of our own privacy, choosing who else has access and on what terms.
There is no quick overall privacy fix, but one of the aims of digi.me will always be to return ever more privacy to its users and thus be the enablers of an increasingly private world.