Leaving Beta & Becoming a Paid Service


Today is an exciting day for Personal. We’re announcing that we’re leaving Beta and will become a paid service.

We started Personal with a mission to empower individuals to easily and securely store, share and reuse their personal data. Today, thanks to lots of hard work and the help of many loyal Owners and supporters, we are making this vision a reality.

Recent improvements to our data vaults make them faster, more intuitive and easier to use. Our Fill It app is helping people save many hours filling out online logins, checkouts, applications and other forms. Companies across industries, as well as schools and other organizations, are partnering with Personal to empower their customers with these revolutionary tools.

The next step in this journey starts today, as we become a paid service. This will enable us to invest more in our growing platform of vaults, Fill It and other apps to make your information even more valuable and beneficial to you. It also shows that, unlike so many other online services, at Personal, you are definitely not the product.

For $29.99 (about $2.50 per month, or the price of a nice cup of coffee), individuals will be empowered with the best data vault and automatic form-filling tools on the market, including:

  • Private, secure web and mobile vaults synced across your devices
  • Unlimited data storage and secure sharing
  • 50 MB of secure document and photo storage as well as integration with Dropbox for additional secure storage
  • Fill It app for automatic form-filling

As a thank you to our early Owners, we are keeping Personal free for anyone who has already signed up. Nothing will change for them.

New Owners, starting tomorrow, will be able to enjoy a 30-day free trial. If a new Owner does not subscribe after the free trial expires, they will still have a free Secure Data Viewer,  so they can view the information they have entered and any information that others have shared with them, even after the free trial expires. More details about the Secure Data Viewer will be coming soon.

Finally, I want to thank our loyal Owners and supporters. Without them, we could not have reached this exciting place. We look forward to more great things to come.

For details on how the paid service terms will work, click here.

 

Shane

By Shane Green in All

June 4, 2013

A Rising Tide of Data, Partnered With Privacy by Design, Will Lift All Boats


This piece was originally published on the Disruptive Competition Project blog (DisCo)

By Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Shane Green

Over the last year, we have started to see a remarkable shift in the way the world thinks about data and privacy. The old levies of compliance and binary permission settings are being washed away by a rising tide of data that is growing at a rate exceeding Moore’s Law.

In fact, more data will be created and captured this year than in all of human history. Fueling this explosion are connected devices so numerous that, according to a recent GSMA study, there will be more such devices throwing off data this year than there are people in the world.

In this rapidly changing data ecosystem, tools such as one-time notice-and-consent agreements and simple transparent disclosures are less helpful, perhaps becoming obsolete. Individuals can no longer be treated as passive data subjects who merely provide information for collection and use by an organization. Instead, more sophisticated approaches are required based on context-based approvals and, more importantly, informed individuals who are engaged with their data across their lives.

We too must evolve, and those companies and organizations that empower individuals to be full partners in this emerging personal data ecosystem will create tremendous value in the form of stronger, deeper and trusted relationships with their customers, thereby gaining new competitive advantages, including greater, not less, access to data.

The latest signs that these once revolutionary ideas are today becoming mainstream, and will tomorrow become the standard for doing business, are two recent reports by centrist, pro-business think tanks. Continue reading

Shane

By Shane Green in Power Shift

April 23, 2013

Data Vaults Go Mainstream at World Economic Forum


In the last six months, a fast growing and somewhat unexpected chorus has emerged around the need to give people greater control over their personal information.

Mainstream think tanks are now focused on it – see the recent Aspen Institute report, which focuses extensively on “the new economy of personal information” and the central role of individuals in it.

Governments are also catalyzing this new model. The Midata initiative in the U.K. and the Open Data initiative in the United States are giving back government-collected data  to citizens in organized, reusable form.

But what’s most interesting is the growing realization among companies that their futures are tied to building new relationships with consumers who are increasingly empowered with and savvy about their digital data, and who have growing concerns about how their data is captured and used.

That’s why a new report released today by the World Economic Forum, whose membership is made up of Fortune 1000 companies, is so important. “Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage” is a product of the Forum’s multi-year Rethinking Personal Data Project, and was led by Forum official Bill Hoffman (see his blog today on the report) and a steering committee of the Boston Consulting Group, Kaiser Permanente, Visa, Microsoft, AT&T and VimpelCom. Personal also participated, and is a member of the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development.

When you consider the organizations behind the report, its major conclusions are all the more dramatic:

  • Companies and governments need to put people at the center of their data, empowering individuals to engage in how their data flows through technology. This means giving consumers greater access to and control over their information as well as the tools to benefit directly from it.

  • We need to move past old notions of privacy that revolved around simple notice and consent. Instead, companies should adopt Privacy by Design principles that address every stage of product, technology and business development. This would ensure, for example, that apps feature user-driven permissioning of data and have greater transparency and control over how it’s used and valued.

  • The report blows a hole through the canard that e-commerce and privacy cannot peacefully coexist. It’s not a zero-sum game. Instead, it’s a win-win for businesses and consumers where even more data can flow between trusted parties.

  • Perhaps most exciting, the report detailed a number of use cases in which companies are helping consumers to leverage their personal information to improve their lives, ranging from health care (Kaiser Permanente) to financial data (Visa) to automotive price transparency (Truecar) to online reputational information (Reputation.com).

  • Personal was also profiled to demonstrate how personal data vaults can make the time-wasting tradition of form filling obsolete, saving literally billions of hours annually, and greatly improving the delivery of public and private sector services. Check out www.personal.com/fillit to see how your company or organization can participate.

We’re excited to see the model we have been building over the past three years start to catch fire, and we expect to see a lot more progress in the next six months.

Shane

By Shane Green in Power Shift

February 28, 2013

Launching ‘Fill It’


Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of “Fill It”, a new app built on the Personal Platform that makes it easier for you to save and reuse your personal information and passwords online.

Fill It for Easy, Secure Password Management

With Personal’s mobile and web data vault, you can already securely store, retrieve and safely share your logins and passwords. With Fill It, you no longer have to copy and paste passwords to log in to websites. Fill It does it for you in seconds.

Initially launched as a bookmarklet, Fill It automatically delivers usernames and passwords from your vault to log you in to websites in seconds. You can also create and save new passwords on the fly. Fill It enables you to get control of all of your passwords so you can stop using the same or easy passwords across sites, saving you time, while  significantly increasing your security. (Mobile logins continue to use one touch copying to clipboard to paste into native and mobile web apps.)

Fill It for Fast Registration and Checkouts

Fill It also allows you to easily fill out registrations and checkouts by enabling you to securely reuse personal and work information, credit card and reward numbers, and other information from across your life. Fill It can help you reclaim dozens of hours of time each year, conveniently shop online and enjoy greater peace of mind by not having your sensitive information on so many sites.

Fill It for Longer Forms

Unlike other form filling solutions, Fill It can leverage thousands of different fields of data (and they’re growing by the day) from Personal’s web and mobile data vault, enabling much more in-depth form filling for a wider variety of forms, such as applications – and with a higher degree of protection.

It’s our mission to make the manual, repetitive, and time-consuming process of filling out forms a thing of the past. With your help — and that of companies, sites and organizations — we can. Just let them know about Fill It and that they should improve the forms on their sites according to best practices.

Getting Started

It’s easy to get started. Simply add Fill It to your bookmark bar. Then go to an online login or form and click “Fill It.”

When filling out a form for the first time, Fill It saves that information in your Personal data vault if it’s not already stored there. Whenever you need that information again, just click “Fill It” to automatically complete the form in seconds.

What does life with Fill It look like? Meet Sarah. Sarah’s a busy mom who uses Fill It to make her life easier – whether it’s logging in to websites, shopping online, storing her kids’ information or keeping track of shipping addresses around the holidays. Watch our video to learn more about Sarah and Fill It.

Calling All Developers, Companies and Organizations

We invite developers, companies and organizations of all types (government, schools, non-profits) to embrace and promote auto-completion of logins and forms with Fill It.

For every form you optimize for auto-form filling, you can save thousands of hours of time and hassle for your customers or constituents, and significantly increase your conversion rates and the quality of the service you deliver.

It starts with following best practices in how you design and implement forms and data fields. Check out the guide we created for you for more details.

 

Shane

By Shane Green in Product

January 16, 2013

Announcing Mobile 2.0


As the lead product manager for mobile, I wanted to wish you happy holidays from the Personal mobile team! We’re celebrating the season by bringing you new features for our iPhone and Android apps.

Mobile 2.0 brings you recently added features from the web and even a few exciting new features of its own. These features give you greater flexibility to organize your vault and find what you need faster. Here’s how you Tag, Filter and Swipe:


In addition to the vault, we’ve launched an entirely new feature to help you add your life’s details to Personal. Just click on the “+” in the top right corner of your vault to go to the “Add Data” screen. When you answer the question: “What do you want to store?” the app provides suggestions for the Gems you might need.

When I want to store information about my VW Jetta, Personal suggests that I try the Vehicle and Vehicle Paperwork Gems. It’s like it reads my mind! (kind of).

Oh, and how can I forget? We’ve also changed our app icon! Be sure to look for it on your phone’s home screen.

Last, but not least, thanks for your feedback throughout 2012. We’re excited for more exciting announcements and product features in the new year. Let us know how you use Personal, suggest a feature on our support site or strike up a conversation with us on Twitter, @personal.

Enjoy our Mobile 2.0, and happy holidays!

 

 

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Katie

By Katie Shields in Product

December 20, 2012