We are delighted to have signed up to the Declaration of MyData principles, and urge anyone else with an interest in how personal data is held and managed to sign too.

The principles, which are a first version and will evolve with a second version expected after feedback in six months, are designed to “make sure individuals are in a position to know and control their personal data, but also to gain personal knowledge from them and to claim their share of their benefits.”

As the introductory text notes: “Today, the balance of power is massively tilted towards organisations, who alone have the power to collect, trade and make decisions based on personal data, whereas individuals can only hope, if they work hard, to gain some control over what happens with their data.

“The shifts and principles that we lay out in this Declaration aim at restoring balance and moving towards a human-centric vision of personal data. We believe they are the conditions for a just, sustainable and prosperous digital society whose foundations are:

• Trust and confidence, that rest on balanced and fair relationships between people, as well as between people and organisations;
• Self-determination, that is achieved, not only by legal protection, but also by proactive actions to share the power of data with individuals;
• Maximising the collective benefits of personal data, by fairly sharing them between organisations, individuals and society.”

The six key principles are human-centric control of personal data, the individual as the point of integration, individual empowerment, data portability and re-use, transparency and accountability and interoperability.

MyData hopes that organisations and companies working in the personal data ecosystem will take and use these principles, to further their own projects, as well as build their own trust frameworks and terms of service.

They accord strongly with our own Internet of Me vision, with the individual at the centre of and in control of, their connected life. And we are also very happy to be a sponsor of the MyData conference next week in Tallinn and Helsinki.

Watch out for more updates on that!