What is a personal data store?

The idea

Most of your data lives in other people’s systems: the shops, banks, apps and platforms you use. A personal data store turns that around. Your data, or a copy of it, sits somewhere you control, and organizations ask you for what they need, on your terms.

It can live on your own computer or phone, on a server you rent, or with a service that holds it for you. What makes it personal is control: you decide what goes in, what comes out, and to whom.

One idea, many names

People have described the same idea in many ways. A few of them:

• Lockbox: an individual-controlled store for personal data appears in patent filings from 2003 (Hayes-Roth, 2004; Yeung & Sandström, 2004).
• Personal data store: community vocabulary by 2009, popularized by Mydex (Mydex CIC, 2010) and built by MIT as openPDS (de Montjoye et al., 2014).
• Personal data vault: named in research at UCLA (Mun et al., 2010).
• Personal data locker: popularized by David Siegel (2010).
• Personal information management system (PIMS): the European Data Protection Supervisor’s term (2016), building on Abiteboul et al. (2015).
• Pod: a “personal online datastore” in the Solid project (Mansour et al., 2016).

The glossary has 149 such terms, and the ecosystem map shows who built them, and who is still here.

Why it matters now

AI assistants and agents are starting to remember you: your preferences, your history, your work. Whoever holds that memory holds a lot of power. Research such as the Human Context Protocol (Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Consumer Reports) explores how a person’s context could move with them from one AI to another. A personal data store is the natural home for it.

Where Praxamark fits

Praxamark™ keeps what you capture, your digital exhaust, the receipts organizations send you and the terms you agree to in your Praxamark Data Vault, a database on your own computer that you can seal with a key only you hold. It is local-first, built on self-sovereign identity principles. It builds on the ideas above; it did not invent them.

References

• Abiteboul, S., André, B., & Kaplan, D. (2015). Managing your digital life. Communications of the ACM, 58(5), 32–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/2670528
• de Montjoye, Y.-A., Shmueli, E., Wang, S. S., & Pentland, A. S. (2014). openPDS: Protecting the privacy of metadata through SafeAnswers. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e98790. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098790
• European Data Protection Supervisor. (2016). Opinion 9/2016 on personal information management systems.
• Hayes-Roth, F. (2004). Personal portal and secure information exchange (U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2004/0267707 A1).
• Mansour, E., Sambra, A. V., Hawke, S., Zereba, M., Capadisli, S., Ghanem, A., Aboulnaga, A., & Berners-Lee, T. (2016). A demonstration of the Solid platform for social web applications. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (pp. 223–226). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890529
• Mun, M., Hao, S., Mishra, N., Shilton, K., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., & Govindan, R. (2010). Personal data vaults: A locus of control for personal data streams. In CoNEXT ’10. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1921168.1921191
• Mydex CIC. (2010). The case for personal information empowerment: The rise of the personal data store [White paper].
• Siegel, D. (2010). Pull: The power of the semantic web to transform your business. Portfolio.
• Yeung, P., & Sandström, H. (2004). Method for control of personal data (International Publication No. WO 2004/072885 A1).