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.

The World Economic Forum’s recent report, “Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage,” argues for empowering individuals with contextual information, tools and services that enable individuals to engage directly with their data and benefit from this revolution. Similarly, the Aspen Institute’s “Power Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy” focuses extensively on “the new economy of personal information” and the central role that individuals will play in it.

Both reports point to a coming “race to the top” where companies will compete on how much value, convenience and innovation they can deliver by collaborating with their customers in a new, permission-based personal data model.

But think tanks and reports don’t make or move markets. Businesses do. And the most telling sign that the future has arrived is that businesses and governments are embracing this model as a win-win for both consumers and businesses.

Start-ups, such as Mydex, Personal, Qiy, Respect Network, and Singly are at the forefront of creating personal data vaults, private networks and identity management tools that, for the first time, make it possible for consumers to manage and benefit from their personal information, as detailed in a white paper, “Privacy by Design and the Emerging Personal Data Ecosystem,” that we collaborated on together last fall. Not surprisingly, venture capital is starting to back such innovation.

Large companies are starting to take encouraging steps. For example, the World Economic Forum report details how Kaiser Permanente helps patients with chronic conditions by providing them and their physicians with better access to and sharing of their health data. The report also shows how Visa helps to prevent fraud and identity theft through the smart use of individual transaction information.

Governments are also taking steps to give data to individuals and are encouraging private-sector companies to do the same. Over the last several years, the U.S. government has launched an open data initiative designed to spur innovation by releasing individual records held by the federal government. Millions of citizens can now download reusable information about their health, energy consumption, finances, and education.

In the United Kingdom, the government has encouraged organizations to release the personal information companies and others traditionally hold back to their customers in a portable, machine-readable, reusable format through the Midata initiative.

With this shift, privacy and control by the individual becomes an even more critical part of this model’s success for companies. To have credibility and trust with consumers as well as regulators, a company with this type of personal data must have privacy embedded in its technology, as well as businesses practices and architecture, through the adoption of a Privacy by Design (PbD) framework.

Accepted by international regulators as the global standard for privacy, the 7 Foundational Principles of PbD have been widely adopted around the world and have now been translated into 30 languages. PbD takes the view that privacy cannot be assured solely by compliance with regulatory frameworks. Instead, privacy assurance must live in an organization’s DNA and be proactively embedded, right from the outset. Nowhere is that more important than in this model.

When done responsibly and effectively, businesses with this model will enhance and innovate around privacy and security. And it will provide strong justification for government officials to refrain from resorting to regulation. It’s a model that supports innovation and will create competition for businesses that push toward stronger, rather than weaker, protections. This will create a race to the top that will give consumers better choices – a win-win scenario.

Dr. Cavoukian created Privacy by Design, and is the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada. Shane Green is co-founder and CEO of Personal, a start-up that gives consumers data vaults for securely storing, sharing and reusing their important information at home and work.

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.

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.

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!

This post was originally published on the World Economic Forum Blog.

Data has the power to transform our lives – collectively and individually. What is needed to unlock the profound opportunity data affords to improve the human condition – and to defend against a multitude of threats – is not technical, but an ethical framework for its use by and beyond those who initially collect it, including providing access to individuals.

At its most fundamental level, data about individuals represents a new kind of “digital self” that cannot be easily distinguished from the physical person. Some consider it a form of property; others a form of expression or speech. Those working in the area of genomics often view personal data as the DNA sequences that make us truly unique. Whatever lens one uses, it has become increasingly clear that the consequences of how personal data is used are every bit as real for people and society as any material, physical or economic force.

Properly harnessed by ethical practitioners, the principled use of “big data” sets can improve our economies, create jobs, reduce crime, increase public health, identify corruption and waste, predict and mitigate humanitarian crises, and lessen our impact on the environment. Similarly, empowering individuals with access to reusable copies of data collected by others, also called “small data”, can help them drastically improve the quality of their lives, from making better financial, education and health decisions, to saving time and reducing friction in discovering and accessing private and public sector services. Evidence of the positive impact of leveraging data, by both institutions and individuals, abounds.

However, data, like the technology that generates it, is in and of itself neutral. It can be used for good or ill. With a proper, ethical framework, data can – and should – be leveraged for the benefit of humankind, simultaneously at the societal, organizational and individual level. Misused, its power to harm and exploit is similarly unlimited.

In fact, what raises the ethical use and respect for data potentially into the realm of a fundamental human right is its ability to describe and reveal unique human identity, attributes and behaviors – and its power to affect a person’s, and a society’s, well-being as a result. Just as in the physical world, basic rights and opportunities must be preserved.

Indeed, it is already well recognized that invasions of our digital privacy can be exploited for repression, and that technologies for sharing data can be harnessed to support freedom. More fundamentally, though, we need to extend our core rights themselves into the digital world. For example, we must adapt our notion of freedom of thought to account for the new reality that much of our thinking goes on in digital spaces – as does the management and sharing of our most private information. Preserving individual freedom will now  require  protecting  autonomy with respect to our own data.

Clearly, cultural and regional differences regarding human rights in the analog, physical world are sure to arise in this digital, data-oriented world. We do not seek to resolve those issues, but to develop a clear framework of principles to help provide data, data access and data use the protections they deserve.

Today, I am excited to introduce the new and improved Personal. We have been getting it ready for you, the Personal community, and now it’s finally here. The new Personal is

• Faster. New streamlined navigation, sorting and filtering gets you where you want to go in an instant.
• Easier. View your Gems and Gems from your connections together in one easy-to-read screen and see who has private, secure access to them.
• Personalized. Easily group your Gems using tags and other views like last updated, most viewed, alphabetical and connections.

Here are a few ways to use some of our favorite new features, like tags:

• Home and Work. Use tags to separate your Gems for home and your Gems for work. For example, you can tag computer, wi-fi and alarm passwords, and other information from around the office with a work tag. Tag the passwords for home computer and other electronics, alarm and wi-fi for around the house with a home tag. Share Gems with family members and co-workers so everyone has easy access to the information when they need it.
• Kids. You can create a tag for each of your children so that you and your family members can easily access the right information when you need it for school forms, applications and doctors’ appointments.

Take the new Personal for a spin, let us know what you think and read our FAQs for additional information.

We would love to hear about your favorite tags and features, as well as what you would like to see in the future.

Entitled Privacy by Design and the Emerging Personal Data Ecosystem and including a foreword by Personal CEO Shane Green, the paper describes the tremendous opportunities and benefits of giving people true control over their information in the digital world. Commissioner Cavoukian highlights personal information as a new asset class and rightly concludes that companies in the personal data sector must adopt privacy by design principles if they are truly going to be user-centerd and user-driven. Politico has dubbed the report “one privacy paper to read this week”.

The paper represents a major contribution to the intellectual foundation of our sector and highlights Personal in a case study for successfully embedding privacy by design into our technology, business and legal framework and practices.

The messenger and the message could not be more perfectly matched. Commissioner Cavoukian originally coined “privacy by design” and its principles, which have been approved as a framework for privacy protection by regulators worldwide, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which recommended in its March 2012 report on consumer privacy that businesses build privacy by design into every stage of product development.

At Personal, privacy by design is central to our platform, company and culture, and we think the kind of user-centric model taking shape in the personal data ecosystem will become the norm. We’re not alone in believing this. Consider, for example, the World Economic Forum’s May 2012 report.

Importantly, the goal of Personal’s model is not to stop the flow of data or to have it held closely for privacy’s sake. Instead, with the right privacy protections and tools for individuals to properly leverage their information, we think even more data will flow, enhancing and enriching a person’s relationships with other people, organizations and apps.

We congratulate Commissioner Cavoukian on this white paper, and are proud to stand alongside others in it, including Mydex, Reputation.com, the Respect Network, SWIFT’s Digital Asset Grid project, Ctrl-Shift and the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium.

For more information, you can read Commissioner Cavoukian’s full paper and watch her video announcement.

We were especially excited to launch ‘Personal for Education’ at the White House ‘Education Datapalooza,’ where we were one of several companies invited to present ways that individuals can put their own federal education data to use.

Fast Form Filling for Scholarships and Financial Aid

Soon, you’ll be able to import your federal education data, including information you’ve previously submitted while applying for financial aid, directly to Personal. In an instant, Personal will transform a jumble of data into categories of organized and helpful information. You can then use and reuse your information whenever you want, whether for completing next year’s aid form in seconds or calculating student loan payments. Check out this video to see how it works.

I’m especially excited about our scholarship and financial aid application tool because of the impact it will have on students like Alfredo Loris. Alfredo is an operations intern at Personal. He and his family, like so many, have struggled their way through FAFSA and other aid forms each year. Now in college, but having to apply for aid each year, this product will make a real difference for him and millions of other students. Learn more about Alfredo and Personal’s fast form filling for education by watching his video on our Personal for Education page. While you’re there, check out a second moving video about Sharon Gatobu and her sister, both of whom have struggled with financial aid applications.

Secure Sharing for Schools and Families

I’m also proud to say that preschools are already using Personal to securely share and keep parents, teachers and administrators updated with constantly changing information, from key contacts and resources at the school to student directories and event schedules. If the school updates anything, say a change in address or phone number, it’s automatically updated for everyone who has secure access to the information through Personal web and mobile. No more showing up on the wrong day or time for soccer, a play, or your parent-teacher conference.

Want more information? Click on Personal for Education, check out our press release, or email partners@personal.com.

Today, at Mashery’s ‘Business of APIs’ Conference in San Francisco, we launched Personal Platform, a collection of developer tools and APIs that enable developers to build web and mobile apps on Personal. We’re excited about Personal Platform for several reasons.

Empowering Developers to Build Great Apps

Personal Platform includes important platform-level privacy and security enhancing features to help developers do what they love: build great apps. We know that developers – especially developers at start-ups – have big ideas and limited resources. Personal Platform gives them a hand with key privacy and security enhancing features, so they can focus on building great apps. These features include:

• Private Authentication: authenticates users with zero third-party tracking.
• Secure Data & File Storage: leverages Personal’s unique, comprehensive platform for structured data, notes, photos and other files.
• Secure Share: provides dynamic permissioning between users and even enables sharing with individuals not on Personal.
• Contact Management: enables network building with contact management features like groups.
• Fast Implementation: will soon enable native SDK’s that developers will be able to leverage with only a few lines of code.

 
150+ Developers Already Signed Up, First Apps Coming Soon

With today’s announcement, we already have more than 150 developers signed up for Personal Platform. And we’re just beginning to glimpse the potential of what this new kind of platform can do. here’s a sneak peak at the first apps being developed:

• FileThis for Personal: a cloud-based service, allows consumers to go paperless by securely and automatically fetching their most important online documents from their financial and household accounts every month and delivering them to their Personal account.
• Password Manager: a mobile app that allows users to securely store their passwords, generate hard passwords, and automatically log into mobile websites on their smartphones.
• Secure Messenger: a mobile app that allows individuals to send private, secure messages, including attachments and location-based data, back and forth with timed expiration.

This is just the beginning. We are looking forward to seeing developers work their magic when the have these tools in their hands. There are opportunities to build everything from office management and home management apps to quantified self apps and sensitive document managers. Just last week, a woman approached me at DataWeek and said she wanted to build an app on Personal for busy moms. The possibilities are endless.

For more information, check out our Press Release and our Personal Platform developer page.

Starting today, you can upload files and photos directly into the Gems in your vault. Personal starts you off with 50MB of secure storage, and, given our encryption technology, we are initially limiting individual file uploads to 3MB per file.

You can connect your Dropbox account for additional secure storage and sharing (the 3MB upload limit per file still applies). To link your account, log in on the Web and look for the Dropbox logo at the top of any Gem:

Introducing the .prsnl file extension: When you link your Dropbox account to Personal, your files and photos are stored as encrypted .prsnl files that can only be accessed and securely shared through Personal.

Here are a few ways to make the most of secure files, photos and notes:

• Snap a photo of your passport for your upcoming international adventure. The photo is instantly encrypted and stored in Personal (or Dropbox). Then share your Gem with whoever is responsible for making air and hotel reservations.
• Take a picture of your prescriptions so you have all the info you need for refills, doctor’s appointments and life’s unexpected moments. Jot a note for your spouse, the caretaker, or anyone else you want to share the Gem with.
• Upload financial statements, tax records, wills, warranties or any sensitive document, and share with those who need them. Once you share Gems, each new file or data you add will automatically update those with access. Stop access whenever you want.

My personal favorite way to use file and photo storage? Meet the world’s best Chianti:

I discovered it at a winery in Italy and immediately knew it deserved a place in my vault. I’ll never have to worry about forgetting my favorite wine, and I can easily share it with my friends and family so they can enjoy it, too (or even buy me a bottle).

Ready to give secure files, photos and notes a try? Visit Gemware to start adding Gems to your vault, and don’t forget to download your mobile app of choice!

Here are a handful of thoughts from the conference that stuck with Shane, Tarik and me:

• With trust playing an increasingly important role in the digital economy, Privacy by Design startups have a significant advantage over incumbents who are struggling to adapt their rigid technology systems and business rules to give their customers more control.
• To truly build a user-centric service or platform, every component of the architecture and product design must be oriented around giving the user control. It’s not just about privacy policies slapped on after the product is built.
• Established companies can empower their users by giving them control over their information. First, only ask for data you are actually going to use. Second, let customers have a copy of any data they give you, and any data you collect or create about them. Third, allow users to delete their data from your system. And above all, be transparent with your users about your data and privacy practices.
• Privacy and anonymity are two different concepts. The former is about being able to choose what identity or information you show to whom. The latter is just one option within a range of privacy settings that lets you turn everything off.

In addition, it was great to see so many tools that help individuals control the information available about them online, and securely share sensitive information with others. We were particularly impressed with SafeShepherd, BrandYourself, and Lockify, but all of the Innovator Spotlight and Technology Showcase award winners are worth checking out. I also encourage you to watch the panels featuring our very own Tarik Kurspahic (“Lessons Learned: Designing for Privacy”) and Shane Green (“Small Data and Personal Identity Management”).

Last but not least, thanks to everyone who voted for Personal to win the pii2012 Technology Showcase Award, less than a year after selecting us for the first Innovator Spotlight Audience Choice Award at pii2011. Like everyone at the conference, we continue to be big believers in the power of data – when used properly – to transform people’s lives, and we look forward to tackling more privacy- and identity-related challenges at the next event.

• A DC lawyer has been using the app to reference hard-to-remember work logins and passwords when he telecommutes, making it easier to work from home.
• A young couple is reaping the benefits of sharing Gems with their online banking passwords, travel rewards numbers and Netflix login information: fewer calls and texts asking for the forgotten information, and the peace of mind that the data they share is for their eyes only.
• A woman told us that the first time she forgot her office alarm code, she set off the alarm and had some explaining to do when the police arrived. She has since saved the code in her data vault and no longer has to worry about another awkward encounter with the police.

At Personal, we constantly use the app to securely exchange information with other employees and office visitors. In this 60-second video, you’ll see how easy it is for my co-worker, Karen, to share the company Twitter password with me.

Download the app for iPhone or Android and let us know what you think.

We were delighted to then be asked to participate in the Forum’s Rethinking Personal Data Working Group, which today released a new report, produced in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group, entitled: “Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening Trust.” You can see the Forum’s press release here, and our own here.

The report broadly defines personal data, including data that is directly or indirectly known about you and your family, friends, work, values and beliefs, location/GPS, car, home, finances, spending, browsing history, app usage, health, education – you name it. It further examines the growing instability that comes from a lack of trust and transparency in how personal data is captured and used by companies and governments, while highlighting benefits for all stakeholders, including people, if a better framework emerges that balances the competing needs and interests of all parties.

While startups are famous for “making sausage” – the idea that the reality is messy behind the scenes even when the outcome is good – I think it is fair to say we made some (very good) sausage over the last year. There were a wide range of passionate and thoughtful views on most every subject that touches personal data – ownership rights, consent, the primacy of the individual, the right to be forgotten, transparency, privacy, data security, national security, sovereignty, public safety, regulation, public health, political freedom, and, last but far from least, innovation and economic growth.

Many of the report’s recommendations focus on much needed improvements to the current model, where companies and governments are central. Others point to ways to explore new models that could give individuals a better seat at the table and that can create, through enhanced trust, even better outcomes for companies and governments willing to abide by new rules.

We were delighted to both participate in this important endeavor and to see Personal, along with companies like Dropbox, Reputation.com, Mydex and Qiy, be highlighted as an innovator working to empower people with their data. We are confident that the benefits will be magical for all involved as people are able to effectively manage and use this “new economic asset” across their lives.

While we all have ways to manage sensitive info like passwords and account numbers (Excel spreadsheets, password apps, Google Docs, sticky notes, emailing yourself, etc.), few are very secure and none allow for convenient yet safe sharing. Here are some of my favorite examples of how Personal comes in handy for this:

Co-managing logins & passwords

Nothing is less secure than emailing or texting a password, yet we do it all the time for accounts we manage with others. With Personal, my husband and I easily manage different accounts we both need. For example, I can grant access to our bank accounts, investment accounts and utilities online, while he manages our insurance, Amazon and Netflix accounts. Either of us can change a password for any of our more than 50 accounts and the other gets updated automatically. It works great for managing logins with co-workers as well, like those for the company Twitter or LinkedIn accounts or the constantly changing demo sites to which we all need access. Not surprisingly, the Logins & Passwords Gem is the most used Gem in Personal.

Finding and sharing the elusive Wi-Fi info

I don’t ever have to waste time chasing down the Wi-Fi login info for houseguests, friends who drop by or visitors to the office. Sharing the Wi-Fi Gem makes it easy for them and me. Best of all, I don’t have to worry about updating them if I ever change the router or my password once I’ve given them access. And it only takes a couple clicks to turn off access if I don’t want them to have it any more.

Keeping track of loyalty programs

Rental car, airline and hotel rewards program numbers are easy to find and share. My husband no longer has to call for my frequent flyer or hotel rewards program numbers when booking our travel, and booking travel at the office has never been easier, even for groups.

Another thing I really like about our mobile apps is the ability to access and modify data without a live network connection. Whether in the subway, on an airplane, travelling internationally or in a place with bad reception, this feature comes in handy.

If you’re an iPhone user, we hope you’re as excited as we are to experience the magic of on-the-go access to your personal data. Download Personal for iOS today and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below – or better yet, a review in the App Store.

You can also download the Android app from Google Play.

In addition to the Owner Data Agreement, we have two other documents necessary for any online or mobile company – our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We posted some changes to them today; nothing has changed in the Owner Data Agreement. Perhaps not exactly world-shaking news, but we believe in sharing these kinds of developments. In the future, we’ll post an archive of them so you can see for yourself how they’ve evolved.

Terms of Use: The primary changes were to add policies for copyright infringement takedown and handling unsolicited business idea submissions and inquiries.

Privacy Policy: We made language about our service consistent with the updated Terms, and added a new FAQ addressing the California “Shine the Light” law, which requires companies to provide transparency in how they share your data. We exceed it at Personal because your data in your vault is yours, and we can’t do anything with it without your explicit permission. While we view these changes as important enough to make, we don’t view them as material.

If you have any questions about these changes or thoughts for improvements, please leave us a comment below or submit your request to privacy@personal.com.

First of all, our hats go off to all of the organizers, track leaders and speakers who made this weekend one to remember: Julia Angwin, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Allen Gunn, Alessandro Acquisti, Sid Stamm, Daniel Weitzner, Andrew McLaughlin, Dan Kaminsky, Ashkan Soltani, Brian Kennish and Jacob Appelbaum. We were impressed with how well-organized, full of camaraderie and downright awesome the event proved to be from the very beginning.

What truly made the event special, of course, were the participants we met and the many projects that came out of it. While all of them were great, here are a few highlights in no particular order:

MobileScope

Voted the “Ready for Primetime” Winner, MobileScope was developed by David Campbell, Aldo Cortesi, Ashkan Soltani and Pascal Van Hecke to provide all desktop and mobile users with “privacy enhancing features via an intercepting proxy in the cloud.” Such features include Collusion, Do Not Track, Certificate Pinning, AdBlock and visualization of your personal data usage. This is the first implementation that specifically caters to non-jailbroken mobile devices.

Make Myself Clear

Our friends at Ghostery joined forces with a few others to build a web app that scans social networks for sensitive information – e.g. references to drugs and alcohol, health issues, etc. – about users. As employers become increasingly insistent on investigating our digital lives, even going so far as to demand job applicants’ Facebook passwords, Make Myself Clear gives us the tools to self-audit and preview the information that a company with access to our social profiles might see.

CensorSweeper

Dan Kaminsky, Joe Geffen and Michael Tiffany teamed up to build a Web app based on the premise that there should be a simple way for everyone (read: a way that doesn’t require people to install code) to visit a website and figure out what has been censored. The first version of the app is live and ready for you to try.

What did the Personal team build?

As far as our own project, Zogger, goes: it’s a Firefox extension that, once enabled, stores data about the sites you visit and gives you a quantified-self analytics view to help you better understand where you go and what data you give up in the process. While it’s still a work-in-progress, you can download the extension and give Zogger a try today.

If you’re a developer, we invite you to fork our extension and build on it.

We are proud to have sponsored this forward-thinking and collaborative event and are already looking forward to continuing the fight for privacy, transparency and, yes, freedom at next year’s Data Transparency Weekend.

As it turned out, SXSW Interactive was raining more than precipitation. Sessions and panels on data and privacy seemed to drop from the sky and made a splash, despite all the buzz around ‘ambient social’ apps. (Observation: these apps were probably the culprits behind draining smartphone power and subsequent hours wasted on searching for power outlets to recharge them.)

But I digress.

Here’s a quick look at a handful of the privacy- and data-related sessions that piqued our interest, including two led by our very own Shane Green and Tarik Kurspahic.

We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights

Placecast’s Anne Bezancon and Personal’s Shane Green teamed up to moderate a lively discussion surrounding the need for a Digital Bill of Rights “by the people, for the people”. The proposed rights, which apply to the “sanctity of the digital self,” are now available for public comment on ourdigitalrights.org. We welcome and look forward to your feedback.

Data is the New Oil: Wealth and Wars on the Web

Data experts from Reputation.com and MIT Media Lab explored personal data as a new resource with multi-billion dollar implications for our data-dependent world. To avoid the breakout of a war on data, they said, we need to create and raise awareness of a new user-centric ecosystem around the asset of personal data.

Sex, Lies and Cookies: Web Privacy EXPOSED!

Privacy experts from the FTC, the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Carnegie Mellon and TechFreedom discussed the central question: “How do we define ‘tracking’ and to what extent is it permissible?” Opinions ranged from staunch opposition to all forms of tracking to the belief that any sort of Internet regulation is impermissible.

The main takeaway? Because it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to reach a consensus on the definition and acceptability of “tracking”, creating tools that empower individuals to better control and monitor their privacy is all the more essential.

Big Data: Privacy Threat or Business Model?

How can we protect ourselves, without overreacting, in the age of data abundance? Can we trust the market to deliver the appropriate controls and user education, or do we need regulatory intervention? These were the tough questions that representatives of the ACLU, EPIC and CNET debated, with the majority agreeing that more transparency is needed of companies that aggregate and analyze big data.

How to Build Privacy by Design into Web and Mobile

Personal’s Tarik Kurspahic provided insight on building privacy and security into every aspect of a company – and why companies should be motivated to do so, despite the challenges posed for small teams with limited resources. One message that resonated with the audience was that every employee in a Privacy by Design organization needs to think and act like a Chief Privacy and Chief Security Officer.

We encourage you to check out Tarik’s presentation on SlideShare.

Based on the volume of conversations around privacy and data–at SXSW and beyond–we predict that 2012 will increasingly favor companies that 1) adhere to transparent data practices and 2) shift toward a user-centric model that puts individuals in control of their privacy and data.

The Personal Team will be out in full force at SXSW Interactive this year. In addition to holding sessions to create a people’s digital bill of rights and share our insights on building a company that follows “privacy by design” principles (details below), we’re here to spread the word about small data.

What is small data?

Small data is big data for individuals. It puts the power and tools of big data, which is geared toward the needs of companies and governments, and not individuals, into the hands of people.

While some say that data is the new oil, we at Personal believe that small data is the new oil.

Learn more about small data >>

Discover #smalldata on Twitter >>

If you spot one of us at SXSW (our t-shirts will give us away), please say hi!

Join us at SXSW

Personal’s CEO Shane Green and CTO Tarik Kurspahic will represent the company at the following sessions on Sunday, March 11. We hope to see you there!

We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights

Date: March 11, 2012 at 11:00 a.m. CT

Location: InterContinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel, Assembly Room

Co-Facilitators: Shane Green, co-founder & CEO, Personal; Anne Bezancon, founder & President, Placecast

Join the #mydatarights conversation >>

How to Build Privacy by Design into Web and Mobile

Date: March 11, 2012 at 12:30 p.m. CT

Location: Hyatt Regency Austin, Texas Ballroom 4-7

Speaker: Tarik Kurspahic, CTO, Personal

Join the #privacy360 conversation >>

Your Personal guide to Austin

As you plan your time at SXSW, we thought we’d offer up these handcrafted Gems of information about Austin essentials, brought to you by Personal.

Learn more about Gems >>

Note: To view this information, you must be logged in to your Personal account.

Austin 6th Street Bars	Indie Austin Coffee Shops	Austin Taxi Companies
Austin BBQ	Downtown Austin Food Carts	Austin Live Music Venues

For real-time updates and tips throughout SXSW, follow us on Twitter. We look forward to getting Personal with you!

Big data is big business

More data is created every year or so than has been created in all of human history. In this always-on, always-connected world, where even things are being plugged into the Web, the amount of data is growing exponentially.

The collection, storage, analysis, use and monetization of all that data is called “big data.” Corporations and governments are hyper-focused on becoming big data experts to avoid being permanently left behind. The first movers to master the art and science of big data are already changing the way we live, while disrupting industries and amassing fortunes at speeds never before seen.

Given the stakes, massive investments are being made every year to build the technology and expertise required to succeed in big data, optimized, of course, around the needs of companies and governments, not individuals. Industry experts have likened this big data boom to the early days of “big oil,” and refer to data as the “new oil.” Just as oil was essential to building the modern industrial economy, data has become the lifeblood of the new digital economy.

Companies must learn to compete in big data regardless of their industry, or else face obsolescence. This is a tough challenge and touches all aspects of the operations, strategy and culture of companies. At the same time, opportunities abound as entirely new industries are emerging around data as they did around oil — sourcing, extracting, refining, mining, analyzing, distributing, and selling large sets of data.

Big data creates big problems

With its insatiable appetite for digital bits and bytes on each of us, big data is driving a virtual arms race to capture and exploit information about our every move. Big data will log the life of a child born in 2012 in such a way that the person’s activities will be able to be reconstructed not just by the day, but by the hour or minute. In the hands of bad actors, the potential for wrongdoing with these permanent and growing archives of our lives is real and rightfully concerning.

Yet, until recently, people had virtually no idea of big data’s existence as its tools and marketplaces remained largely hidden. The next generation of tracking and data mining technologies are being created based on the assumption that individuals do not care enough to change their online and mobile behavior, which confuses lack of interest with the current lack of alternatives.

But with privacy and security concerns now front-page news, and the financial triumphs of companies built entirely from personal data such as Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, people are waking up and starting to ask tough questions. While companies and government regulators negotiate over how to curb the most egregious risks and abuses, a new and more powerful model is emerging that is designed around the needs and interests of people, providing them a far better, more sustainable alternative to the status quo.

Enter small data

Small data puts the power and tools of big data into the hands of people. It is based on the assumption that people have a significant long-term competitive advantage over companies and governments at aggregating and curating the best and most complete set of structured, machine-readable data about themselves and their lives – the “golden copy”. With proper tools, protections and incentives, small data allows each person to become the ultimate gatekeeper and beneficiary of their own data.

Built on privacy by design and security by design principles, small data can help people become smarter, healthier, and make better, faster decisions. It can help people discover new experiences more easily, reclaim time in their busy lives, and enjoy deeper, more positive relationships with others.

Small data can also greatly improve the capacity and performance of governments and non-governmental institutions, from eliminating time-consuming forms and other inefficient data practices, to improving public health and education by leveraging the power of more accurate and complete data provided with an individual’s permission. Such institutions can also help share important data with individuals, allowing them to have a copy for their own use.

Applied to commerce, small data holds the promise of connecting people with the best and most relevant products and services in a safe and anonymous environment. It can transform advertising into a more respectful, less disruptive industry that rewards people for their time and engagement with their messages and for their purchases. Small data offers customers the opportunity to better balance and assert their interests with companies (some have called this model Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)). Companies who play by these new rules and earn the trust of individuals will be rewarded with access to rich and robust data otherwise unavailable, giving them instant competitive advantages over companies who choose to go it alone.

The first small data platform – a data vault, private network and apps

Personal has spent over two years designing, building and launching the first scalable small data platform. At its core is a secure data vault to aggregate and store structured and unstructured data from just about any source. A private, personal network sits on top to set permissions for data to enter or exit the vault. People are able to connect with other people through the network, and soon with companies, apps, and private or public institutions, and decide which, if any, of their data they are willing to grant them permission to access.

We have put equal weight on privacy and security, and on helping people leverage their own data in exciting, new ways. These concepts are inextricably linked in small data, which requires a high degree of trust to function properly. Similarly, we have rewritten the legal rules of data ownership to protect and empower users, who we call owners. And, because we know relationships can sometimes end, we have built what we believe is the most complete data portability and deletion capabilities in a data platform. Trust doesn’t work unless you are truly free to leave.

In addition to launching our own apps in the coming months, we are inviting developers to apply for early access to build apps on our platform to show off the power and benefits of small data. Individuals have never imagined the magic of running apps on reusable, structured data about the most important things in their lives, while developers have never assumed having access to such high quality data on which to innovate. The possibilities are limitless.

We are excited to help usher in this new era where permission, transparency and privacy become the norm, and where companies and governments have to align around new rules and provide clear and compelling benefits in order to earn access.

At Personal, we see the future through the lens of small data — and we think it will change everything.

You need to have a home for your data. I’m trying aggressively to define this home, in… the best software, the best technology, the best legal terms. This home is yours — that you own, that you control. And this home is for your data.

This ability for you to have it and share it out, is going to transform our industry, over the next ten years. There is going to be this tectonic shift, as everything sort of re-shapes and re-centers itself around people, around individuals, and around the mountains of data that they have… Everybody talks about ‘big data.’ This isn’t big data. This is going to be the era of small data, of my data.

When the WSJ approached us about a sponsorship opportunity, we were enthusiastic to jump on board. For more than a year, the Journal’s “What They Know” series has documented the rise of the multi billion-dollar industry centered on the use of personal data (“big data”) by companies. This event promises to promote transparent data practices across the Web through developing solutions to reveal the prevalence of tracking, provide visibility into how much information people share, and improve software that helps people to control sensitive information.

Here are our top three reasons for being involved in the weekend and why, if you’re a programmer, you’ll want to participate, too:

1. As a startup, we embrace the philosophy that, “If you’re the smartest person in a room, you’re [usually] in the wrong room.” We look forward to being in the company of well-respected Internet privacy experts Julia Angwin, Ashkan Soltani, Sid Stamm, Daniel Weitzner and others.

2. For the first time, we’re making our “small data” platform available to developers. It will be exciting to see what these coders can build on top of a platform designed to facilitate the creation of privacy- and security-minded consumer applications.

3. When 100 coders get in a room together, magic starts to happen. That’s why we’re sending a team of our own developers to partake in this collaborative experience.

If you’re a coder, product developer or engineer, we encourage you to submit your application and join us in NYC!

Event Details

Date: April 13-15, 2012
Location: New York University School of Law
Cost: Free
Application: Currently accepting applications at http://datatransparency.wsj.com/

For more information about this event, please take a look at today’s press release.

There’s still much more to do:

1.  In talking about reform and creating a new model, we must put individuals firmly at the center of the framework. This means giving them the tools to drive demand for their valuable data resources to transform the current model into a “user-centric” one. With individuals truly in control – and looking out on the world from their perspective – every other principle and right about privacy falls into place.

2.  While the framework will require companies to re-evaluate their data practices and conform to new standards, what about our government’s obligations in handling our data? The Obama Administration has been impressively forward-looking in this arena – particularly with veterans, education and health record data – but it seems that individuals care as much about what the government knows about them as they do about companies.  We need rules for government, too.

3.  Actual citizens need a seat at the table alongside the privacy advocates, law enforcement representatives, companies and academics that will help establish codes of conduct.  If the framework is being constructed for the benefit of individuals, don’t we deserve a say in the matter, too? Perhaps the final say?

To make the last point a reality, we’re taking matters into our own hands.  In a few weeks at SXSW in Austin, Texas, I will join my friend, Anne Bezancon, founder and CEO of Placecast to create – with other SXSW attendees – a Bill of Rights “by the people, for the people” that we would expect both companies and the government to respect. If you will be attending the conference, please join us for our interactive Sunday afternoon session, We the People: Creating a Consumer’s Bill of Rights. Please also check out the session by our CTO, Tarik Kurspahic, on building a “privacy by design” company.

No one knows the answer – yet – because no fair market exists for individual data.  The question raises the possibility that, if it’s not very much, people are unlikely to care enough to change their behavior. We believe there are a host of non-economic reasons that people will want to proactively manage their data (time savings, greater privacy, less friction, making better, faster decisions, etc.), but the question of determining economic value is critical.

The current model is built for companies, not people

Some look for clues to the average annual revenue per user for Google and Facebook. These “free” services, whose advertising revenue is based largely on personal data, earn $24 and $4 respectively per person every year. But is $28 enough to motivate people to change their behavior and do a lot of work? Maybe not.  But it is the wrong question. Properly used, we believe companies like Personal will be able to prove your data, when tied to a single purchase, can create 10-20x the value that Google or Facebook can over a year.

The current paradigm is entirely dysfunctional and inefficient from the perspective of the individual. For example, the Direct Marketing Association says over 97% of online advertising fails to reach the right person at the right time. The pennies from the 3% success rate may add up for companies exploiting data across millions of people, but it requires a number of unsustainable practices, such as the increasingly invasive and sometimes unethical tracking of people. It also requires that they co-opt your attention and time and resell that along with your data to others trying to reach you.

The emerging user-centric marketplace

What might a user-centric marketplace look like and how much economic value can a person realize in a year?

First, you need a marketplace that respects the sanctity of one’s data, time (time is money, after all), privacy and identity (anonymity is the default). The technologies, business rules, and legal and privacy protections must be created nearly from scratch to protect the individual. (Our CTO, Tarik Kurspahic, will present at SXSW on building a privacy-by-design platform).

Second, the marketplace would focus on commercially relevant data such as your brand, travel or clothing preferences, along with data about your intent to buy something (also known as purchase intent).  These two types of data alone can fundamentally change data economics when combined with a controlled marketplace to reach you when and how you want to be reached.

This last point is key. We do not support the idea of people “selling” personal data. Rather, we believe such data can be used in a safe environment to connect people with companies with highly relevant products, services and even content and information. Doc Searls and others have referred to this idea as Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Companies that play by these new rules will have the most direct and positive channel ever created to reach people, including their existing customers.

People can realize thousands of dollars per year

Finally, we believe companies that earn your business (and those who don’t) will be willing to compensate individuals for having the chance to interact with qualified buyers of their particular good or service.  This far more efficient marketplace can easily add up to thousands of dollars annually as people realize the full benefit of their data, time and purchases. That should move the needle for just about anyone.

We appreciate the serious attention being focused on this emerging space by the New York Times, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, AdAge, AdWeek, Forrester Research, MIT Tech Review, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, the Harvard Business Review and others. It is an idea that will ignite untold innovation and benefits for each of us.

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 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).

Our smartphones are as vital to our daily lives as a strong cup of coffee or a warm bed at night. Without them, we get nervous. How could we be disconnected from our text messages, Twitter, our games, our loved ones, our contacts, or our calendars for any length of time?!

We feel the same way about personal data. That’s why we’re making sure that your information is always at your fingertips with the launch of our Android app.

You’ve always been able to access your Personal data vault through the mobile web at personal.com, but now Android users can download our app in the Android Market and have secure, instant access to the most important details of your life.

With our app, you can enter info when you’re out on the town (like the fantastic wine that you’re enjoying with dinner) or always have access to the details you already saved in your vault, like your numerous passwords and logins.  And, you can share these gems back and forth with whomever you choose.

No more anxiety over finding the data you need, when you need it most. Our app provides a sense of confidence and what I call: “tech swagger.”  You now have the ability to securely and easily organize, search and control access to your digital information and online identity.

Make your life Personal.

Very understandable.  After all, you provide your username and password to log into Personal. It may seem like magic – or just hard to believe that we wouldn’t store a copy of your password – but it actually comes down to a little bit of very smart math.

In cryptography, there is a set of functions that comprise a Secure Hash Algorithm, or SHA, designed by the National Security Agency.  SHA functions are used with your password to produce a hash, or a long string of letters and numbers, that Personal stores for comparison with the password you enter, but cannot be used to reverse engineer your password. (If you want to get deeper into it, this Wikipedia article will help.)

Here’s an example:

Let’s say this is the password you’ve chosen to use on Personal: $aGuhetE4e6E5e%a.

When you register for Personal, we will take that password, apply the SHA functions and hash it like so:

SHA-256($aGuhetE4e6E5e%a) = 7313c5fdbe55eccd01e857cb64c5784d569f342f191d118dfffcbc8c748d37d7

This long string of characters is known as the hash. Only the hash is stored in the database. We never store your actual password, and it cannot be reverse-engineered from the hash.

The next time you come to Personal, you’ll enter your username and password again and Personal will simply hash the newly-entered password. We then compare the  two hashes (the stored one and the entered one) to determine if they match. If so, we allow the login. If the passwords don’t match, we know to reject the login attempt.

This is just one of many security concepts and best practices that Personal uses in conjunction with a SHA-256 password hash to keep your sensitive information safe and accessible by only you and those to whom you grant access.

Do you have a question?  Let us know in the comments and subscribe to our RSS to get notified when we post more on these topics.

11.11.11

I don’t want to overplay the significance of today’s date, or the fact that our web and mobile web service went live in open beta at 11:11 am GMT and was announced on Twitter for the first time at 11:11 am EST. What matters is that after two years of hard core work on a totally new kind of platform, we’re out there.

Our Android and iPhone apps will be launched later this month. We will be promoting our launch in the coming weeks once the mobile apps are out given the importance of the full mobile experience to our personal data vault and private network products.

We also have a new web site and an updated look to our brand, thanks to our new marketing team.  In case you missed it, you can read about the team, which includes former execs from Nike and AOL, and a new advisory board member from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, in our announcement.

We really appreciate all of the people who signed up and used Personal during our closed beta. Your engagement and feedback was awesome! Among the improvements you’ll see are:

-  More ways to easily import data, including community gems created by Personal owners and partners. We are especially excited about what community gems can do to allow people to share knowledge and structured data with each other. You can read more in the gemware section on our site.

- Personal network snapshots for every contact and gem so people can quickly see who has what data in their life, and what they’ve received from others. This is like your personal data graph, so you can quickly and easily see all of your data relationships in life.

-  Our “Form Killer” app to instantly fill out forms online and off. This is the first true app built on top of our platform, and we think it can be huge. Imagine not having to fill out any more forms. Our developer program will be launched soon and more apps are on the way.

-  Identity management gems to help people control how others know them in Personal and elsewhere. We are excited about being a leader in this growing area.

We really liked this article in AdAge Digital yesterday called “Personal Data is the New Oil.” It’s not surprising that those in the advertising world are among the first to get how disruptive – and ultimately beneficial – Personal and companies that believe in a people-centric data model can be to creating win-win outcomes for commerce and advertising.

We can’t wait to hear what you think about the new product! Tell us at feedback@personal.com.

Shane & the entire Personal team

Washington, DC & Sarajevo

As we launch Personal in open beta, we’ve taken a hard and long look at how to give our owners more control of their online identity. With your private, personal network, you have the ability to decide which parts of yourself to reveal when connecting with others. Currently, we don’t even allow people to search for you on Personal. Just connecting with another person in our system requires that you know his or her email address in advance.

Identity management starts with four basic features, and we’ll be adding many more regularly:

Username

Username will be how you are known in the system. Pick an anonymous username as you have many other chances to share your true identity if you choose. When connecting with others, only your username, along with your avatar if you add one, will be automatically revealed.

Personal Me Gem

This gem contains contains your actual name. If you decide to share it with someone in your network, you will be known to them personally (by name)!

Social Me Gem

Want to share your username and an alternative or anonymous picture?  This gem allows you to outside of Personal, or when publishing community gems.

Anonymous

We believe strongly in your right to remain anonymous when you choose. At present, we only support remaining anonymous when publishing community gems, but will be rolling out new anonymity features in the very near future.

We’re excited to hear what you think about these features when you get to try them out.  Feel free to send thoughts or questions to support@personal.com.

None of the core principles of the Agreement have changed.  Among other things, the new Agreement now anticipates an exciting new feature that allows you to import data from corporate partners about their products and services to your Data Vault.  Although you’ll be able to access and use the information you import into your vault whenever you want, the new Agreement makes clear that any intellectual property of our partners will, of course, continue to belong to those companies.

If you do not accept the new Agreement for any reason and no longer wish to continue using Personal, please email us at support@personal.com.  Should we receive such a notice, please note that the existing (and new) Agreement provides you 30 days to export your data before we close your account.

What a difference a year makes.

Amid the many positive developments and increasing coverage of this issue, such as The Wall Street Journal’s courageous “What They Know” series, comes the excellent new Forrester Research report Personal Identity Management by Fatemeh Khatibloo, which was released this past Friday.

The report is not only a must read for those who want to understand the complex dynamics at play in this space, but it provides an accessible framework that will help companies prepare for the transformational empowerment of individuals that is already underway. Download the report.

You can also read Khatibloo’s blog on the report at Forbes.com.

After requesting a delay to review privacy concerns, a judge approved this week the $13.8 million sale of the personal data to Barnes & Noble after B&N agreed to provide an explicit “opt-out” opportunity for customers on the list, which B&N initially called unreasonable. B&N will send emails to all customers and post an ad in USA TODAY announcing the opt-out opportunity.

As one of their 48 million customers, I can only wonder what information they have on my family and me from the past 20 years. While I am thankful the 1988 Video Privacy Act will prevent Borders from selling any information on videos I may have purchased from them, no law exists to protect the even more revealing history of my book and magazine purchases (and good luck sorting out which I bought for myself and which as gifts). And, like most busy people, I will probably miss the chance to opt out because it just won’t be convenient enough for me to do.

So what should happen to “customer data” when a company is sold or goes out of business?  What if that company were not just a bookstore but Facebook, Google, Twitter or LinkedIn? What if the buyer were not a reputable company like B&N but one of the growing number of data brokers whose sole business is exploiting customer data for their own financial gain? This doesn’t even consider theft, which is exactly what Borders has claimed in a lawsuit against its online rewards partner Next Jump because it used Borders’ data to solicit their customers to make a jump to its own OO.com reward site.

At a minimum, each person should have the chance to review his or her data, download a copy if they’d like, and easily opt out of the proposed transfer. Having a complete copy of my book and magazine purchases for the past 20 years would be fantastic, and I might even be willing to agree to B&N getting their own version if I understood their privacy policy (which I don’t) and they could show me benefits that I find valuable, such as better recommendations for future purchases. If the company trying to buy customer data were not one I knew or trusted, opting out would seem to be the only prudent choice.

Given the amount of data being collected these days, and the fact it is becoming a more and more valuable “asset,” visionary companies should be thinking of entirely new and transparent ways to engage their customers in sharing and using their data. Otherwise they will increasingly find “opt-out” as the default response.

Here’s a basic question: what is personal data? I think I have a pretty good handle on it – but then again, I work with Personal. To find out what regular people think, I asked my friends and family what personal data means to them.

My friends and family aren’t wrong about personal data – in fact, if you’d asked me to define the phrase a few months ago, I probably would have answered like they did.

But as I’ve explored the topic, I’ve learned that personal data goes much deeper than account information and logins. It also includes your musical tastes, what brand of jeans you’re most likely to buy, where your family is planning to vacation, and even your dog’s dietary preferences. This data flood was the subject of my previous, liquid-based video.

But personal data is also the sum total of all these individual data points. Once you put enough pixels together, you can get a pretty good picture of who you are and what you might do. That’s why your personal data is so valuable. It’s not just a few account numbers. It’s your whole life.

NEXT TIME: Even if you only think of personal data as just private information like passwords and bank accounts, you’d still want to keep those details secure and organized, right? You might be surprised how some of my friends and family store their data. Or you might find it all too familiar…

(To share this video, use this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxfYnQyqgzA)

When Personal asked me to write about personal data and privacy issues from a consumer’s perspective, I knew very little about online privacy. So I started reading up on the issue and talking to the Personal team. And wow – things are pretty scary out there. The news about corporate data abuse and criminal data malfeasance seems almost overwhelming.

But I wondered: if I didn’t know about all the companies that have laid claim to my personal data, how much do other people understand what’s going on?

In order to illustrate the problem of personal data and how companies use it, I turned to the medium I know best – YouTube. I made this video using a plastic bag, some cups, a nail, and a popular sports drink.

That’s the problem with personal data in a nutshell (or in a plastic bag – I’m trying to stick to just one metaphor here). You and I are giving away our data and privacy every day, drop by drop.

(To share this video, here’s a handy link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9k1ekOSCeY)

We submitted two sessions for company executives and we’re also included in several other panels that are now under consideration. In choosing submissions, SXSW scores each proposal, with 30 percent of the score based on public voting, which closes on September 2^nd. We’d love to get your “thumbs up” vote, but first, here are summaries of each presentation we submitted:

“Taking Back Data You Never Thought You Lost”

In this proposed SXSW talk, co-founder and CEO Shane Green reimagines how the world would work if individuals owned, catalogued, and mined their own personal data, instead of companies. For example, based on knowledge only you have about how you prefer to travel, the kinds of destinations you like to visit or the services you appreciate in a hotel, think of how quickly the perfect vacation could find you, instead of you searching for it or, worse, being bombarded by irrelevant ads and spam.

You can read more about Shane’s entry and vote for it here.

“How to Build a Privacy By Design Web Company”

Personal’s founders committed to create a company with both privacy and security baked in from the start. This proposal features co-founder and CTO Tarik Kurspahic, who will share how we accomplished this. For example, to include something as seemingly simple as a video player on our website to show our How It Works video, our developers needed to engineer a solution that ensured viewers’ information wouldn’t be shared with the player company, as it usually is, and that their visits to our site wouldn’t be similarly tracked.

You can read our submission for Tarik and vote for it here.

More Personal Data-Focused Panels

Personal has also been included on three other SXSW submissions for panels with representatives of likeminded companies. You can read about them – and vote for them – here:

Rules for Innovators of User Centric Personal Data

Is Privacy Dead or a Billion Dollar Business?

Legal Architecture for the Personal Data Ecosystem

Thanks for voting and supporting us at SXSW in 2012!

Hi! I’m James Kotecki, a writer and video blogger who’s passionate about technology. Personal has invited me to guest blog here with an everyman’s perspective on personal data and online privacy. Let me start with a confession: before I met the folks at Personal, I didn’t think too much about those issues.

Sure, I’ve read about data breaches at massive storage facilities that house customer data, and I think it’s creepy that Facebook ads target my relationship status (see Rule 8(c) of Facebook’s own policies).  But I figured I had to give up my personal data in exchange 21^st century conveniences.

Maybe that’s why I never treated my own data with much respect, relegating accounts and passwords to various Word documents spread out across my hard drive, and leaving digital records of myself everywhere I go on the web. I’ve long accepted that many companies have a better handle on my data than I do. I just never knew there was anything I could do about it.

But my friends at Personal put it this way: if corporations are cataloguing and profiting from your data, shouldn’t you be able to do that too?

After all, my personal data isn’t just a set of abstract numbers – it represents the foods I eat, the places I’ve lived, the movies I like, the people I know, and even my plans for the future.

In a very real sense, my data is me. Shouldn’t I decide how it’s used? (Spoiler alert: yes.)

So now I’m on a mission. Through occasional written and video posts, I’m going to explore who’s got my data, how they’re using it, and how I can take back control.

Hmmm . . . I wonder how I’ll do that…

One day, I was sitting at my desk and decided to create a video that would illustrate Personal in a fun and easy way to understand. The video illustrates the struggles of a person who doesn’t quite know what to do with all his data. He finally gets guidance from a friendly voiceover guy who explains about how Personal can help people manage their data overload.

And there you have it! Personal is easy to use and convenient. The only question you probably have now is: why haven’t you been gemmin’?

(If you want to share this video, here’s the link to embed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MPLm9aHcUM)

It is no secret that Google Analytics is one of the best tools for website analytics, but have you ever wondered why such a powerful tool is free? Because it comes with strings attached. When used, website visitors are tracked by Google as they move from page to page, allowing Google to produce great reports for the website owner, but also to aggregate data on users as they travel from Google-enabled site to Google-enabled site. Instead of allowing individuals to be tracked on our site, we opt to process our logs using a mix of Open Source and homegrown tools that we install and run.

The problem is not just limited to website analytics. It exists with every tool that is integrated directly from third party sites, such as CAPTCHA, Facebook Like buttons, social network share buttons, and others. Here are some ways we protect individual’s privacy at Personal:

• We use Open Source software that we install and run.

• We build our own tools to perform specific tasks.

• We partner with companies and use their tools in ways that are not at odds with privacy.

• We proxy requests to some third party services for users so they are not directly exposed.

All of these efforts cost time or money, or both, but because privacy is a crucial aspect of what we do, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

There are so many musings that we’re bursting to share, but, to create some order in the chaos, we’re focused on four specific areas:

1. Power Shift. This is where we’ll share our vision for a future built around individuals controlling the power and value of their personal data, instead of companies. We’ll also write about the latest policy, technology, private sector, and nonprofit developments affecting this historic opportunity.
2. Product. Making data fun and interesting isn’t easy. Join us in a wide-ranging discussion on Personal’s platform, data vault and gems. Share your feedback and ideas, and react to new product announcements.
3. Practical Tips. We’re tapping into our team and outside experts to share tips and how-to’s that help protect your personal data and privacy wherever you go online.
4. Inside Personal. Building any fast growing company has its challenges. Add to that a big, disruptive model built on transparency and trust, and we think this is just too interesting to keep to ourselves. We’ll show you the “sausage making,” with a special focus on the hard choices we constantly face to enable a truly people-centric world to emerge.

Contributors come from across Personal and bring their unique perspectives. We’ll also have guest posts from some of the interesting people we get to work with outside of our company. If you like what you read here and would like to guest blog, we’d love to hear from you. Post a comment below!

Speaking of comments… We moderate comments to prevent bots from spamming us and filter out profanity. Our goal is to approve comments from real, live people within 24 hours or less. We encourage you to be as opinionated as you want to be. Just please — don’t curse and don’t be a robot.

• People are increasingly aware and concerned about how their information is used, and new opportunities for them to directly benefit from their data are emerging every day

• More and more companies are uncomfortable with current practices and are looking for a positive, permission-based way to interact with their customers and their data.

• Visionary policy and regulatory leaders recognize the need to move beyond the traditional privacy debate to a user-centric model that empowers individuals with control over their own data and to decide who gets access.

Although the vast majority of venture capital and corporate R&D dollars continue to fund even more powerful and exotic ways to capture and exploit our data, I’m encouraged that some investors on both coasts are starting to warm up to the idea that privacy isn’t dead, and that major new market opportunities can be built around a user-centric model. I look forward to more great news from others taking this approach.

Our CEO, Shane Green, recently wrote a blog post with his thoughts on the closed beta invitation and feedback process.  Like Shane, I cannot wait to hear from our new users. There is always room for improvement. We are committed to providing a service that is useful and fun – your feedback is key!

Comment on this post or send an email to feedback[at]personal.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

1. What is your significant other’s name?
2. What is your pet’s name?
3. What is your firstborn child’s name?
4. When is your birthday?
5. When is your anniversary?

Combining these in a fairly predictable way, I could almost always get close.  After a few questions, many people started to realize that their entire digital life was locked away behind these easily picked locks of their own creation. Banking, credit card accounts, emails, instant messages – all potentially hanging in the breeze.  Not a good feeling when you’ve always acted with the presumption of security and privacy.

For some people, I would ask different questions, “what is your favorite beer,” or “who is your favorite athlete/celebrity,” but the principle is that people generally create passwords around things meaningful to them that they can remember.  If you understand this principle, passwords become increasingly easy to guess, as they are almost always based on common words and names.  They more you know about a person, the easier the guessing game.

This gave me a natural segue to talk about password security and password complexity, topics of ever increasing importance in the digital age, and as more and more of our lives transition to the digital realm, the trend isn’t going to reverse anytime soon.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll talk further about how to keep your digital property safe and secure!

Like many startups, we’ve been so focused on building our product that we only recently poked our collective head up and looked around. And there are meetups and conferences filled with people whom we can’t wait to get to know. In May, several of us headed out to the Privacy Identity Innovation conference, aka pii2011, to meet with some of the most well-known thought leaders in online privacy.

We were invited to present the company to the 250 attendees as one of 12 startups highlighted in the pii2011 Innovation Spotlight, where we played the product’s “How it works” video and risked the hotel’s spotty Internet with a live demo.

It was the first time that people outside our company and limited beta testers had seen the service in action. Other attendees had a lot of thoughtful questions for us, and it was both humbling and exhilarating when they voted us and another startup, PassTouch, the top choices for the Innovator Spotlight Audience Choice Award. We couldn’t have asked for a better debut.

Check out Shane’s perspective on pii2011 on his blog, Getting Personal: My Data and the Digital Me.

That was the question we debated. We were probably in a room that we call the Fishbowl, and there was probably coffee involved. In the end, we developed the concept of a “data gem” – a grouping of reusable, modular data that addresses a specific activity, item, issue or need.

And naturally, you store precious gems in a vault. Or in our case, in the private, online data vault that Personal provides.

You can read more about data gems, how they work and why data is valuable in Shane’s blog.

These investors – many of whom helped build the current digital world – share our belief that a sea change is coming. That it’s time to put individuals in control of their data.

Our Series A funding gave us a stiff wind at our back, enabling us to bring Personal to life. Read what Shane, our CEO, wrote in his blog about what it’s like to fundraise for a big, disruptive idea.”