When you hear the words “we’re from the government, and we’re here to help you,” skeptics advise fleeing in the other direction.

However, when U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the “My Data Button” initiative last Thursday for freeing individual education records from the government and giving control over them to the individual, the expression rang true.

My Data Button would give individuals the power to access and import their federal education data for their own use.  The rationale is simple: It’s our data, and we should be able to have a copy to use however we want.

Three private sector companies stepped up to help make this announcement become a reality.  As Chopra announced, Personal – in addition to Microsoft and Parchment – committed to offering services to help individuals upload, access and control this information.  We are proud to join this effort.

Imagine having all of your education records in a Gem housed in your own data vault, conveniently at your fingertips and ready for reuse in your private, personal network.  Apps built on our platform would also help mash it together with other data to learn new things about yourself and to help with educational and financial planning, using, for example, federal student loan information.

If Chopra – who has been the Obama Administration’s passionate and effective voice for liberating individual data from government stockpiles — has his way, this idea won’t be left to the imagination.

Read Aneesh’s blog post, and view the Administration’s fact sheet, which mentions Personal’s commitment.

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review focuses on “audacious ideas” to tackle big problems in business, and it features a succinct and powerful economic argument for how and why control and ownership of data will shift toward consumers away from companies.

The piece’s author, prominent technology and VRM (vendor relationship management) thinker Doc Searls, writes that consumers will soon replace companies as owners of their most important personal data.  This will result in the rise of an “intention economy” (the title of his new book) in which a consumer will be able to voluntarily, and anonymously when desirable, use his or her own intent data in a marketplace to have high quality, relevant companies compete for his or her business.  Economically speaking, consumers leveraging their intent data and engagement in such a marketplace will consequently drive demand for it by companies.  That demand will be expressed through highly relevant opportunities and even direct compensation to the consumer.

At Personal, we couldn’t agree more, and we are building that marketplace on top of our platform right now.  We repost Doc’s piece here:

Stop Collecting Customer Data

Let consumers control their personal profiles

By Doc Searls

Vendors have been amassing and mining customer’s personal data for years, armed with increasingly sophisticated and aggressive technologies and dazzled by fantasies of “personalizing” marketing to the maximum extent possible. Customers naturally see this trend as a gross invasion of their privacy and are starting to resist providing accurate information – or any information at all.

But the main reason for vendors to quit this practice is not that it’s bad manners. It’s that businesses soon will no longer own the data anyway – customers will. And when that happens, vendors will end up reaping greater benefits than they do now.

Here’s why: When customers own and control their own data, demand will drive supply more efficiently than supply currently drives demand. Customers not only will collect and manage their own data but will be equipped with tools for declaring their intentions directly to the whole marketplace, without having to flit from store to store or website to website looking for what they want.

In this “intention economy,” customers will determine the products they want, the prices they pay, and the terms of engagement they require. Those terms will include both permissions and restrictions regarding the use of their data. As a result, market conversations will be far more personal, substantive, and manipulation-free than the coupons, traffic-building promotions, and annoying “personalized” messages consumers get now, based on readings of the data trails they leave behind.

This shift will be scary to many. It will strip the gears of marketing as we know it, But it will also improve marketing by fostering the design of new and better means of customer engagement – means that satisfy real demand directly, inform product development, and build true brand loyalty that goes both ways.

Doc Searls is an alumnus fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, forthcoming).