“Companies and developers can… use ’s APIs to request access to integrated data sets to provide better data-driven experiences, services, and rewards, and to provide other benefits like rich personal analytics. Then when a third-party app needs access to a particular subset of your data, say your transactions for the last 24 months to do a more accurate credit score, it authenticates via the app - meaning that you have to explicitly agree to the specific data request - and the app pulls the data from your personal cloud and grants the third-party app access to it. When needed, data stored in your personal cloud is securely processed via your own temporary virtual machine instance sitting on Microsoft’s Azure cloud so that it is normalised and kept up to date, with the local app essentially acting as the front end, gatekeeper (including the holder of the needed keys), and distributor for that data. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram etc.), with financial and health data currently in various testing phases, including a country-wide ‘living lab’ project with Iceland. The way works is that the mobile or desktop app asks where in your personal cloud you want your data stored - currently that means Dropbox, with the other usual suspects supported soon - and then it asks you to connect the app to various personal data-points. This needs to be done in a transparent way, and the resulting platform on which companies can build apps on top of should adhere to the principal of informed consent.īetter still, what if your data doesn’t unnecessarily leave your own device or personal cloud storage but can still be shared with businesses on a per use case basis? Nearly 7 years in the making, this is the promise of and now combined with Personal. The premise, Ranger told me during a call late last week, is that consumers are being enticed to hand over more and more personal data in return for better products and services, but what is still needed is a platform to put you in control of how and who that data is shared with. Personal’s enterprise solution TeamData will be spun off as a separate information security and productivity solution for businesses, while the broader and hugely ambitious vision for the resulting remains to become a major player in what founder and Chair Julian Ranger calls the emerging ‘personal data ecosystem’. Terms of deal remain undisclosed, although I’m told that the combined entity will operate under the brand and give the company a 60-person headcount who will operate out of a global HQ near London in the U.K. and Personal, two companies that broadly play in the personal data space by offering apps to securely store and share various data about yourself, are announcing a merger.

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