As long time MyData supporters and collaborators, we were delighted to attend last night’s London meet-up.
Hosted at the ODI in Hackney, our fab Chief Product Officer, Fab de Liberali, explored the current state of play around making data mobility truly accessible, running through digi.me’s role as the data facilitator in the CTRL-Shift Personal Data Mobility Sandbox, where partners include Facebook, BT, the BBC and others.
He told the assembled data enthusiasts about digi.me’s “interesting” company journey, from a social media back-up tool to a consent mechanism.
For him, Fab said, data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge turns into experience.
Crucially, he said: “The most significant technology of our time depends on one thing – rich, consented sharing of data.”
Data mobility, he said, faces its “biggest challenges around infrastructure and standards.”
In the Sandbox project, he said, digi.me was called on to be “a new entity. A data facilitator, working on behalf of the user, drawing data from the data importer to the data exporter.”
Users, he said, have a right to get information that is held about them, but questions have arisen about how this can most effectively and securely be done, hence the Sandbox project.
Organisations in general, he said, “need to value data and do the right thing”.
Directives such as Open Banking are a step in the right direction, he said: “They are offering the opportunity, but are we sure that users understand how to use APIs?”
Digi.me’s Private Sharing platform, which gives businesses tools to access consented data in an ethical way, is better for individuals and businesses because it offers rich data and edge processing.
In terms of digi.me’s plans, he said having the right product at the right moment was crucial for a scale-up – and explained how we want to work with government and regulators to define a standard for the industry.
Thank you, MyData London, for the invite and a very interesting evening. We’ll certainly be back!