News Story

MiData Personal Data and Trust Lab

Kate Dungate, Friday 12 December 2014 | Annotate

In August we published a story entitled Citizen Data - empowering citizens about how KMi had joined a three-month feasibility study on how to empower citizens with their own data. A report detailing the outcomes of the study has now been released and can be downloaded here.

Other organisations involved in the research include the Digital Catapult, consultancy Ctrl-Shift and non-profit trade organisation, The Open Identity Exchange (OIX). Together we have just completed a project to understand how a new type of "personal data lab" might be constructed. The idea is that it would work with volunteers and service providing organisations to design and test services underpinned by user volunteered personal data.

During the project 130 citizens, 15 small digital innovators and four corporates were interviewed. We found that they had a desire to work with such a lab subject to some clear conditions.

1.       The citizens wanted to see benefit in return for volunteering their data. Their preference was not for a cash incentive, but rather for the services they use to work better.

2.       Citizens were also much more comfortable with their data being held and used by a local organisation, rather than a central/national organisation.

3.       The application of pseudo-anonymisation and privacy preserving techniques make citizens more likely to volunteer their data.

4.       SMEs, corporates and councils were happy to engage, as long as the Lab was able to focus on well-defined problems, which were of business interest to them. This was a clear indication that any Lab should be problem driven, rather than a purely experimental facility.

You can read more about the lab on Digital Catapult’s blog.

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