Solution

The Personal Data Locker, An Open-Source Data Platform Centered Around You

- David Siegel

You probably have an iOS or Android phone. It has apps. Most of them are “free.” The apps trap your data. You manage dozens of logins, and very few of your apps can talk with each other. It’s just like having a mini-desktop computer in your pocket!

This is not what our tools should do for us.

Over the years, I have made three short videos describing this project:

2010
In 2010, I wrote a book called Pull. The book told many stories of how different life would be if we used data in a 21st century way, rather than digitizing our old ways of working. The book describes the concept of a personal data locker.

That year, I made this ten-minute video to show how a consumer might experience the difference:

2017
Seven years later, I gathered a group of volunteers, wrote a big white paper, and created the Pillar Project, based on a cryptographic token, to raise money to build the PDL. The project raised $21 million in four days. If you have two minutes, watch the short explainer video from that time:

The Pillar Project is doing well. The app is in the app store. But because it is grounded in blockchain/crypto and has its own token, it’s not the personal data locker I wanted to create, so I left to start again.

Our goal is to create the open-source operating system that will run your digital life. It can take over any device just by logging in or being near it. If you need a phone, just borrow one, log in, and that phone is now your phone. The hardware doesn’t matter. The hardware will be built into your watch, your glasses, an earpiece, your home, your car, your office, your hotel room, or your airplane seat. It’s wherever you are. Just log in and you’re back in the driver’s seat. The fancy hardware that makes Apple a trillion-dollar company just melts into the background, as video cameras and microphones have already.

2020
Here is my latest 4-minute video:

Key components

You will build and use a self-sovereign digital identity
This means you are responsible for your own identity. Microsoft, the W3C, and others are coming together around the DID standard, which could be the foundation of identity for this century.

Own and maintain your own data
You will keep a record of all your travel, likes, comments, photos, videos, appointments, doctor visits, diagnostics, prescriptions, classes, grades, parking tickets, purchases, reading, people you meet, conversations, and much more. You own it. You control it. You use it for your benefit.

You don’t do it by hand
You’ll use software to accumulate, organize, and use your own data. These are your personal digital assistants. Today, we have Siri, Alexa, and Google. They seem free, but they are actually quite expensive. They work for their companies, not for us. This is the wrong model. You want to have your own software working for you on your own data on your own terms. You want to use all the APIs available to bring your data home.

A market for personal digital-assistants
In the world I want to create, there is an open market for personal digital assistants that can use your data to help you best. If you don’t like your assistant, fire it and hire another one to work with your data. This open-source playing field gives consumers choices that are fundamentally different than the monopolistic solutions we have today.

From apps to services
Apps are traps. Apps keep our personal data on private-company servers. When we have proper, legal digital ownership of all our goods, and services are represented by digital tokens, markets become much more liquid. This is what I call the world of offers. It’s meant to replace apps, which haven’t scaled and are bottlenecks and traps for data and poor management of assets. We can transform apps into services. For more on the world of offers, read The Pillar Project Gray Paper.

The world of offers
As described in Pull, you shouldn’t need apps. You should be able to see the world of online offers. As you specify what you are looking for, offers come in. And you take whichever offer you want. Accepting an offer enters both parties into a contract that specifies exactly what happens to the data.

As an example, Meds By Me is a startup that shows all the pharmacies in most US cities that carry a drug, listed by price. This is an apples-to-apples comparison of the same prescription for the same number of pills. This app doesn’t care which pharmacy you choose - that’s up to you. Another example is GasBuddy, which shows you the price of gas in a radius that you can drive to.

Part of our initial app will be a generic comparison engine. You ask it for something, and it will bring you all the offers that match your request. To prevent spam, we will charge companies a small amount to access the platform. We will let any company compete, but we will also work to eliminate scammers. 

From vendor-centric to user-centric
Today, we fit into a vendor-centric world:

They have their hooks in you. On each site: we register, set up our accounts, give our payment details, and manage our settings. We are part of their ecosystem. They are not part of ours. This is a “push” paradigm based on the old supply-chain model.

In my world, the customer is at the center:

With the personal data locker, the vendors and their brands don’t matter nearly as much. They have to offer the best product or service at the time the user wants to “pull” it.

Share data as needed
You should share your data with companies only as needed. You should give permission to use your data only for a very limited time or a single purchase. As you gather and control your genomic data, health records, and many more details, you will need help to manage all the permissions and sharing with others. Every time you share data, there should be a two-sided contract with obligations on both sides. I have written about this. Customer Commons is working on it.

The algorithm problem
YouTube’s algorithm now determines what kind of content creators make. The YouTube business model is to sell ad impressions to millions — it isn’t very different from the interruption-model of advertising on TV. Educating consumers is as important as creating a new business model for content. Here’s Derek Muller to explain:

And here is my response:

Micropayments
Micropayments will help us migrate away from subscriptions. While vendors prefer us to pay each month, whether we use their services or not, a better model is to pay for what you use. So you might want to watch a movie or read an article on a web site, but you don’t have to register and subscribe. In my world, you just make a small payment and then you have access to the content. A micropayment model would help vendors align their products and services to what the market wants at all times.

Infrastructure should be open-source
To level the playing field, no single company should own the infrastructure of any industry. That eliminates pay-to-win. I want to show the way by starting with small pilot projects with the power to transform industries and create a new era of competition and innovation.

Who is this For?

This platform is for people with connected lives and busy schedules. It’s for our children, so they don’t grow up in a world where all their data is monetized by advertisers and marketers. This is for early adopters of technology who care about privacy and security. Ultimately, this is the operating system that empowers everyone, same as the Web does today.

If you’re an active consumer, chances are advertisers are spending at least $500 a year putting ads in front of you. They will measure the effectiveness of those ads until you spend at least $2,000 with them, probably more. They are not in this for fun. The more you are tagged as a responder, the more they will learn about and predict your behavior, the more targeted ads you will see.

Use Cases

Next, I will give examples of how this could work. In these scenarios, assume you have all your data going back many years.

Example: Social Networking

It’s true that Facebook has all the users, but it also has all their data and is losing trust among many of them. We can all agree that Facebook should not be the dominant owner of our private data, yet many challengers have come and gone. In my view, the only solution that has a chance is one where:

• You collect your own data

• You own your own data

• You pay to store and safeguard your own data

• You use your own data to benefit yourself

• You employ software that makes it all easy

• You control the rights to your content

I believe this kind of platform can become viral because a) it gives people what they want, b) it costs them less in the long run, and c) many service providers will come to this platform to make money. So, while the platform is open-source, there are many ways for third parties to offer products and services on top (similar to WordPress or Linux).

There is no way to out-market Facebook. They only way to win is to create an alternative social network owned and controlled by its users, where each person is a “node” on the network and is in complete control of the connections, the algorithm, and the content.

Example: The Pull Marketplace

I describe the world of offers in my book, Pull:

Today, millions of products are listed actively on millions of web sites. We use search engines to find them. In the world of Pull, all your products have online digital birth certificates, and you maintain the data for them. If you want to sell something, just lower the offer price and offers will find you. This is the world of passive commerce — it flows the opposite way to the supply-driven approach we use today. It’s a switch from pushing products and services down the supply chain to pulling them as needed. This is semantic search — similar to the way we search on Kayak.com:

Kayak has pretty much every commercial flight in the world. Kayak doesn’t care which flight you choose. You enter your search and filter parameters, and you choose what’s best for you. They do have some ads and promotions, but mostly you get what you want, because you can see everything the way you want.

Example: Your Personal Digital Doctor

Would you rather have IBM Watson as your personal physician, or a nice person wearing a lab coat with degrees on her wall? In a few years, I would much rather have Watson. Watson has read every paper in every field, understands that many papers are highly biased and many are worthless, has access to tons of data on many cases and conditions, can communicate with other specialist systems, and readily changes its mind when it learns something new. In contrast, your doctor sees a very small number of patients, doesn’t stay very up to date on research, has little idea about outcomes, and is mostly interested in maximizing his own career. I’d rather hire and pay Watson to be my primary care physician and then use the services of the medical system to get tests, opinions, procedures, drugs, etc.

This is the idea of the personal data locker and the digital assistant marketplace. Your primary-care bot would work with you to optimize your health. It would use many other specialist bots to help you with dermatology, eye care, various kinds of diseases, sports medicine, travel medicine, cardiology, neurology, radiology, etc. All of these bots have access to your personal data. You pay them. Any time you want, you can fire them and get new ones.

I would let my personal-care bot make the decision, not the humans. For a tough call, I might hire five bots and go with the majority opinion.

Example: Your Personal Financial Advisor

Today, the law requires intermediaries to hold your financial assets for you in most countries. So in this case, you will transfer all your assets to a single registered broker and then manage everything from there. Your personal data locker has your entire real-time balance sheet and every transaction, so it knows everything about your financial situation. It’s your data, you store it and you manage it. You can go to the bot store and hire any number of financial bots to manage your assets. The list may include insurance, long-term investments, short-term, cash management, credit, funds, tax advice, risk management, foreign-exchange, etc. For more, read my piece on the future of insurance.

Most of these will be algorithm-based, so you just hire your own bots and they will trade for you. You will probably want a master portfolio manager bot to manage all your specialist bots. And you will have a financial-advisor bot to help you with your financial goals. You will probably have a comparison bot that helps make sure your bots are trading and investing for you with up-to-date strategies and is always looking for better specialists.

Example: Your Career and Education Coach

To understand how bad the situation in education is, I recommend reading Bryan Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education. I don’t advocate trying to fix or improve education; I believe we need to replace it entirely with something more effective.

The answer is — your digital assistant working with your personal data locker! I believe learning and then doing is over. We have to learn by doing. We have to interweave doing and learning starting as early as possible. I have ideas about primary and secondary school education, but here I’ll focus on people 18 and older.

The model is simple: work and learn, work and learn, work and learn.

Your personal digital assistant knows more about you than anyone. So your digital assistant also becomes your career coach, tutor, and guide to future knowledge and success in business. It’s all zipped together. The goal is to set up a pattern of learning what you need to learn as you need it, which helps you stay relevant in the economy during your entire life.

How this would work: You talk with your assistant about your goals, and it finds options and brings them to you. Together, you discuss them and choose whatever looks best at that time. For example, you may need work now to pay your rent, but you also want a career in film production. So your digital assistant tries to help you get either the most money with the skills and credentials you have or a relevant job in the film industry. Since everything is machine-to-machine, your digital assistant tries to negotiate the best job for you.

You may want to learn about anthropology or biology just for fun, in which case your assistant will help you do that using many available online resources, some of which are paid and many of which are free. This would not be related to work, it would be a hobby, though the skills acquired may figure into future job choices. As your digital coach knows more and more about you, you can start to trust it to bring you new and interesting things to learn, jobs to consider, or side projects to work on. If a better coach becomes available, you can easily switch. The new one learns all about you by mining your past data.

I envision learning resources to be “atomized” so they can be consumed and learned in many different ways under different circumstances, and your personal coach will use all those resources to help you skill up. Everything is unbundled and “a la carte,” rather than structured as a semester or even a course. Two good examples are Marginal University and Kahn Academy.

I think more and more, the project will become the basic unit of work. We will have markets for people to collaborate with software to work on projects. (I believe collaborative projects and simulations should also form the basis of primary and secondary education.)

In my view, the future for anyone over eighteen is 80 percent work and 20 percent learning on an as-needed basis for your entire life. There won’t be any law school or architecture school or degrees in physics or chemistry. There won’t be any big retraining programs - you’re always retraining. You’ll go get a job, and the job will pay you for the skills you have. Your employer will expect you to learn and improve, no matter what your age. You might dedicate a day a week or a few hours a day — whatever you need to keep improving your skills and increasing your market value.

People born today will live much longer than previous generations. We will work and learn this way well into our 80s.

I hope we will mostly do away with professional licenses and overconstraining regulation, so markets can just solve problems dynamically. Studying for and getting a certification, license, or degree means much less than we think it does. I would work hard to educate employers to forget about credentials and signals.

You, and everyone else, will be augmented by technology. This is great. We will all have access to tremendous resources. Machines will do most of the repetitive work. Humans will do nonroutine physical and cognitive work, alongside our robot and AI helpers. Sometimes we will help them. Anything we need to learn, we will get by working and learning at roughly the same pace.

Your personal coach is also your professional partner. Working together, you can do much more than you can do alone. It doesn’t just help you learn, it helps you get your job done. At any moment, it may find a stretch job you should apply for, even though you’re happy where you are. It can help you negotiate everything with current and future employers.

There will always be new ways of learning, and your personal assistant will continually adapt to help you get where you want to go.