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A look back at personal data control initiatives: Self Data, personal cloud

Published on 25 October 2017
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

In France, the Metropolis of Greater Lyon is the first local authority to have joined the Mes Infos experimentation of the FING, a project of personal data restitution which includes today 2300 testers on the French territory.

The security and protection of personal data is an issue of growing concern to Internet users. Moreover, they are seeing their personal data volume increase: applications, digitization of services (energy, health, administration, etc.), social networks, etc. However, this data remains isolated in the silos of the services to which Internet users subscribe. Providing real means of control over personal data is a subject that has been the subject of experimentation for several years, notably in France (MesInfos), in the United States (My Data Initiatives), in the United Kingdom (midata) or in Finland (MyData Finland). This article reviews the concepts, tools and feedback from these movements.

Personal data control: concepts and tools

Self Data, Smart Disclosure, Quantified Self, Personal Data Economy: what are the differences?

"Self Data" is a concept that aims to put the individual back at the center of data management. It was developed by the FING in 2015 in its second experimentation report. Self Data includes "the production, exploitation and sharing of personal data by individuals, under their control and for their own purposes". This term is not (yet) used in Anglo-Saxon countries, which are developing the concepts of"Quantified Self" and"Personal Data Economy", "Smart Disclosure" and " VRM".

Self Data puts forward the access to data as a condition of power to act. It is a complex notion, which covers many possible uses and benefits (economic, recreational, political, personal,...); Quantified Self induces a statistical approach of the individual to his activities, because it designates the practice of "self measurement". It refers to a movement born in California that consists in knowing oneself better by measuring data related to one's body and activities. The Personal Data Economy, on the other hand, directs the debate towards the economic opportunities of the control of personal data by individuals, i.e. the market of products and services created or affected by the reorganization of the collection, management and sharing of personal data. Smart Disclosure is when a company or government department provides users of their services with periodic access to their personal data in an open format that can be reused to make more informed decisions, which is similar to the notion of Self Data. Smart Disclosure, Self Data, Quantified Self and Personal Data Economy have a lot of overlap but reflect different approaches to personal data control, each emphasizing one or the other aspect of personal data control.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) advocates the idea that customers can become traders of their own data or manage the uses they wish to make of it, thus reversing the CRM paradigm in which all customer data is centralized and managed by the company. Organizations can benefit by improving data quality, breaking out of data silos for a more global view of the consumer, recreating a relationship of trust, but also positioning themselves on new markets for personal data services (as MAIF is experimenting with Cozy Cloud). VRM was initially explored within the VRM Project at Harvard University in the United States.

This concept was developed by Doc Searls in the United States as part of the "VRM project". This concept has been taken up and promoted by the FING. It is now the subject of articles on certain specialized marketing sites and has also been included in the conclusions of the 2016 Publicis ETO Intrusion Barometer: "If this approach still seems utopian today, it nevertheless has the merit of showing the direction. Consumers are maturing and are increasingly aware of the value of their data and the interest of brands in this information. We should no longer hesitate to provide them with the means to better manage their relationship with the brand."

The tools of personal data control

To implement the concept of Self Data (or its equivalents), individuals need to control their data:
  • storage space
  • a connection
  • ergonomic organization and management tools
  • a coherent way to share them
The personal cloud is one of the answers: an individual's data and documents are stored and accessed via a personal space with secure and decentralized storage. This personal cloud translates into a type of tool called the Personal Data Management System, better known as PIMS, a personal server that centralizes all the user's personal information. This server gathers all of the user's favorite applications and data and allows them to share their data with third-party services.

The European Data Protection Supervisor published an "Opinion on Personal Information management Systems (PIMS)" on October 20, 2016, in which he very clearly calls on the Union to support them. They "contribute to a sustainable and ethical use of big data as well as to the effective implementation of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)," in particular through the right of access and portability. For companies that process data, they can "help them comply with the GPDR" while "reducing the cost of access" to "complete, targeted and quality data."

3 pioneering experiments

MyInfo in France

The FING and several partners are exploring Self Data, which is defined as "the production, exploitation and sharing of personal data by individuals, under their control and for their own purposes: to know themselves better, to make better decisions, to evaluate their past decisions, to make their life easier..." via the MyInfos project.

The Fing has been exploring the potential of Self Data for 4 years. In 2016, a small group of companies and public actors launched a pilot: data holders return to their customers/users the data they have on them, in a perennial way. The data returned to individuals is multiple: mobility data, consumption data, communication data, insurance data, ... They can be recovered and processed under the control of individuals in their PIMS (Personal Information Management System). MesInfos explores and experiments an approach covering several sectors in order to move towards a 360° approach. The pilot mobilizes all the stakeholders of the Self Data value chain: data holders, service providers (developers, start-ups, companies, ...), "early adopter" individuals, researchers and practitioners, ...

Work and experiments from 2012 to 2016

 2011 and 2012: exploration

The work on Self Data started with an observation: the broken trust of the French regarding the use of their personal data by service providers and applications. Workshops, intelligence work and creative explorations were conducted to identify the types of data concerned that could fall within the scope of personal data control, the areas of use for individuals from their data (management, control, self-knowledge, awareness, decision and action, contribution), the potential benefits as well as the risks.

The project partners relied on a review of the French and international literature on the subject, on meetings with the Midata project (United Kingdom), with the VRM project (United States), and with French researchers, experts and entrepreneurs, and on the results of creative workshops organized to carry out this inventory. The identification of the families of uses was done by analyzing and crossing the pioneer services of management and use of personal data, the ideas of the innovation communities, the consultation of researchers,...

November 2012 - June 2013: time for experimentation

The first experimentation took place in 2012-13. It brought together eight large companies, 300 testers, 1 charter of MesInfos principles, 1 team of researchers. Innovation competitions were organized to propose third-party applications and services that would give users the opportunity to get to know each other better. A secure personal cloud was created and made available and the 8 companies involved in the project gave back their information to the testers during 8 months. At the end of this period, the data restitution stopped and the personal spaces were closed.

2014-2015: preparation for scaling up

The experimentation allowed us to learn from the observation of users, data holders and third party services and to identify the challenges around Self Data, including the business model of third party services and the legal aspects (informed consent, restitution to the right person,...).

In 2015, MesInfos Energie and MesInfos Santé were launched in order to deepen these issues, working in the long term and in detail. For these projects, the FING was inspired by the American movement (Blue Button and Green Button). But in the French approach, the cross-referencing of data remains the cardinal point insofar as it is the cross-referencing that offers a value-added service. A mapping of energy and health data was carried out as a first step: these mappings show the variety of the data concerned as well as their heterogeneity. The data directly related to the theme obviously appear under several categories and context, reference, standard and of course profile data, more general, are also listed.

The second step aimed at exploring the possible uses of these data. Finally, the third step consisted of a synthesis for each project, outlining the potential use cases and the challenges of their implementation.

2016: launch of the MesInfos pilot

In 2016, legislative advances (enshrinement of the right to portability of individuals' data at the national and international level), the encouraging results of experiments, and the consolidation of an international network of self data players led to the decision to launch the MesInfos pilot.

Several organizations, such as MAIF, Orange and EDF, have agreed to return their data to their customers on a permanent basis. These partners are creating APIs so that users can interface with their platforms. Other organizations will join the initiative: Engie, GrDF, EDF, Enédis, Crédit Coopératif, BNP. The MesInfos pilot started with 300 testers and had 2,300 in October 2017. One territory, Greater Lyon, has also joined the process. Although administrative data is still relatively absent from the experiments, this local anchoring should encourage their development.

Some of the services created in 2013 will be reactivated. Others have developed but due to the lack of API on many services, they offer "workaround" features: data "scrapping" (image analysis).

The pilot is accompanied by researchers in marketing, sociology of uses and ergonomists.

NB: If MesInfos Energie has been integrated into the pilot, MesInfos Santé remains independent for the moment insofar as health data are much more sensitive than energy data: the experimentation requires support for the testers, an educational exploration and an installation of the platform on a secure local server. The project has been renamed "My Data My Health" and is now supported by Cap Digital in collaboration with the Fing.

Midata in the UK

The Midata project in the United Kingdom set out to "leverage the economic potential for businesses to shift their customer relationships from a one-sided approach to data collection to a shared approach based on mutual trust . Launched in 2011 on a voluntary basis, it brought together 26 private partners alongside regulatory bodies. The sectors targeted were energy, personal current accounts, credit cards and mobile telephony. It led to the establishment of a regulatory framework(Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act) in 2013 that strengthened the ability of the government to require data to be opened up from companies in the four sectors covered by the program. To date, this enforcement power has not been implemented.

Preparatory work on potential demand in 2012

In 2012, the English government conducted a focus group and telephone study to detect the potential behaviors and needs of a midata service. The study found that the attractiveness of the midata offering is influenced by a few main elements:
  • a large number of activities carried out during the week
  • the habit of comparing prices and offers
  • willingness to change products or services easily
  • willingness to conduct online transactions
The main benefits perceived a priori by the focus groups are saving time, money and life comfort, and less so the concern for decision support, understanding one's finances or transparency and ethics. Those most in favor of collecting, cross-referencing and sharing their data are in the 25-34 age group. The 18-24 year olds are less so, which can be explained in part by the fact that their financial and administrative situations are often simpler. Finally, the importance of reassuring potential users with security measures and guarantees regarding the use and sharing of their data is essential.

Results

The government proceeded via calls to action andcalls for evidence to implement and monitor the project. A call for evidence in the energy sector was issued in December 2016 to inform the preparation of regulatory work.

A status report on the project was conducted in 2014 in the form of a written survey of companies in order to learn about their initiatives in terms of making data available to consumers and their results. In the banking sector (current accounts and credit cards), the information made available is in PDF format. Banks' concerns about the security of the data in case of sharing with third parties was identified as a major obstacle. As for the very low switching rate for current accounts, it seems to be linked to the lack of tools available to consumers to compare offers, the cause of which is the absence of data available in a compatible format.

In the energy sector, the electricity suppliers, more or less established on the market, had made efforts to make available data series in a compatible format. However, not all of the existing comparators on the market offered the possibility to analyze midata files.

Cell phone data is most often available in .pdf format (few operators offer to download data in a machine-readable and reusable format). However, many offer comparison sites exist and some of them already offer automated access to detailed data.

Regarding personal data protection issues, working groups including companies, online comparison services, consumer groups and public authorities have issued recommendations that mainly include consumer information and notification of rights as well as risks of certain services and ongoing monitoring and discussion of the ethics of personal data use.

This initiative gave birth in 2015 to two commercial services, price comparison in the financial services sector(Gocompare) and energy(The Voltz App) incorporating consumers' personal data (if they so choose).

Several sectoral initiatives in the United States

In 2010, the United States launched a number of sector-specific data return initiatives, grouped under the name My Data Initiatives. They include: The administration's March 2016 review of My Data Initiatives shows the following results:
  • More than 3 million veterans, government employees and Medicare beneficiaries have access to their personal health data (more than 46 million accesses)
  • Approximately 150 million Americans have access to their health records, including information from health care providers, medical labs, pharmacies, and vaccines. The majority of health insurance companies offer online access to information and more than 16,000 health organizations are listed on Blue Button Connector (a tool that helps patients access their information online)
  • More than 150 energy providers have committed to making a Green Button available to over 60 million homes and businesses. Money savings and environmental impact are at the forefront of the benefits.
  • Any American enrolled in the free online "my Social Security" service can download a copy of their Social Security return. This document can be shared with a financial advisor or with software to help with financial planning for retirement.
  • Finally, millions of students and their parents use MyStudentData and fafsa.gov data about their student loan balances, scholarships, enrollment and payment information to help them manage their loan repayment or choose which college to attend.
The authors of the article noted several areas for further development of the approach: sharing patient data for research purposes, and steering the data management policy of federal agencies by the General Service Administration and developing a secure authentication service (connect.gov, the equivalent of France Connect).

Specificities and differences between data privacy initiatives

Consumers are not like other users

The FING has listed the categories of benefits since its first exploration booklet (2013). We rely on this list to evaluate the benefits put forward by the project leaders through the communication elements (press releases, websites, studies). The benefits are listed below:
  • Control: protect your data, know what you know about yourself in order to correct it or have it deleted, control what you transmit or not...
  • Management and convenience: manage your documents and paperwork; update your data automatically with your contacts; automatically fill out online forms while controlling what you send or don't send to each company...
  • Self-knowledge: follow the evolution of your sports performance; understand the mechanisms that influence your mood or your health; tell yourself about your week through the places you have been, the things you have bought and the things you have done online; take stock of your skills and "employability"; compare yourself to others on the criteria that matter to you...
  • Awareness: calculate your ecological footprint and make practical choices (energy, mobility, consumption...) to reduce it; manage to consume organic or "ethical" without spending hours or paying too much...
  • Decision and action: compare offers according to one's lifestyle (for example, telephone rates according to one's actual mobile communications history), choose a place to live, express one's projects or purchasing intentions at a market and wait for proposals from several suppliers; organize one's time and travel, optimize one's overall energy consumption, manage one's budget and finances, declare one's taxes in two clicks, send a personalized CV, renegotiate contracts...
  • Contribution: make your health data available for a clinical study (as do the users of PatientsLikeMe), your mobility data for dynamic urban mapping, your geolocation to feed Open Street Maps...
  • Live an experience: discover, feel, share, live a playful and emotional experience thanks to the data.
Source: Self Data exploration notebooks N°1 (text) and N°2 (graph)

Purchasing power: the point of convergence between the three approaches

In this respect, the words used to designate the beneficiaries of these services clearly reveal the approaches of each party: in the United Kingdom, we speak of "consumers", in France, of "users" and in the United States, alternately of "Americans" and "consumers". In the first two cases, the bias is clearly illustrated. The term "Americans" is used to designate both citizens and consumers.

All the studies point to a key benefit of personal data restitution: saving money, which belongs to the "Decision and Action" category in the FING typology. The English study conducted in 2012 on the potential demand for data restitution services argues that "the future of midata will be determined by the availability to the consumer of products or applications that clearly appear to him as solutions for saving time and money". As the first services developed are price comparison services, it is the consumer who is the first target of the project.

In the United States, purchasing power is a recurring theme. The first initiative concerns the health sector, a key public issue under the Obama administration. The American health care model is largely dominated by private organizations: health care management is therefore a direct financial issue for Americans. In the energy sector, the Green Button is largely relayed by industrialists (who have joined together in the Green Button Alliance) who put forward the economic argument for the various target audiences, except for communities (owners and tenants, companies, developers). However, other benefits are put forward, as we will see later.

In France, the question of economic gain is present but it is put on the same level as other benefits in the FING's communication.

Other profit categories treated differently

In the UK, the dominant economic approach, the benefits for consumers have been described above. The other category of benefits does not join the FING typology which concerns users, but concerns the market and more specifically SMEs, developers, entrepreneurs: this new segment creates opportunities to develop new services and acquire excellence. It is a British specificity to make this benefit a central element of the strategy and the discourse.

For the US, several benefits are covered, but they vary depending on the initiative. The U.S. government's approaches to electronic health data(health IT, Precision Medicine Initiative) highlight each of the benefits listed: Data protection and security, "better information for better care," "makes health care more convenient," "update your medical record," "improves research and health tracking across the country," ... In the area of education data(Education data Initiative, MyStudentData), the benefits announced in 2012 were to "help consumers make more informed decisions and improve learning outcomes" i.e., to have better self-awareness and optimize decisions and action.

MesInfos presents on its website the concept of Self Data and develops the multiple benefits. In the introduction, it is still the management assistance, the decision and the action that are put forward. Some of the pilot's partners have begun to communicate: MAIF highlights the value of trust, which is close to the benefit of "controlling one's data"; as does Orange, which talks about "giving back control [of personal data] to users". The benefit Living an experience is an addition in V2, we can conclude that this benefit had not been identified in the "theoretical" work of 2012 and that it appeared with the experimentation of 2012-13.

The degrees of state intervention

The United States and the United Kingdom have launched pioneering initiatives (2009 and 2011 respectively) coordinated by the public authorities from the outset. MesInfos, launched in 2012 and supported by an association, the FING, has benefited from the feedback of each of these projects, and has been able to develop its own approach.

From incentive to legislation

The degree of government involvement is different in each initiative. In the United States, the government has encouraged organizations to set up "buttons" and use standards, making room for a voluntary approach. The industry has taken advantage of this incentive: today, the Green Button Alliance is composed almost exclusively of private players who are leading the work on energy and water data standards. This is also due to the fact that the role of the State is much smaller than that of the European welfare states, and therefore the actions towards these sectors are competitive and therefore economic issues.

In England, the government has been slower. Surveys and task forces are being conducted to make the necessary decisions at the state level. Two years after the first "calls to action", it legislated in 2013 by introducing in theEnterprise and Regulatory Reform Act the possibility for public authorities to ask companies to return their data. He also took over on the issue of standards and interoperability; seeing none appear, it is the government that proposes one for industry. It should be noted that in 2014 the public authorities did not

A correlation between state involvement and the speed and scale of deployment

In the United States, the availability of data restitution services on a large scale has been rapid: regarding the Blue Button, 1,000,000 veterans had used it only 3 years after the first official discussions and today more than 3 million people have access to their personal health data. But also, 16,000 health organizations offer the data return service. In addition, initiatives are gradually spreading to other sectors and the federal government is providing support to facilitate and secure user authentication. The administration has not acted directly on requiring companies to implement initiatives, but it has called for action. On the other hand, its driving role is undeniable insofar as it was the administrative services (Veterans Affairs, Medicare) that first offered the opportunity to return data. These opportunities helped to create a call for private initiative.

In England, several data reporting services are available. The key performance indicators identified in 2014 by the government were:

  • Availability of data in a standardized and compatible format
  • In the energy and banking sectors (current accounts), the switching rate illustrates an effect of data restitution. This is an end goal rather than a means goal.
  • Number of downloads
  • The rate of use of the comparators
No precise figures are given, but it seems that since the services are available to consumers, many millions of British people have access to these services. The government conducts studies, poses issues and challenges, specifies the framework, and has given itself the power to compel companies to put in place the means to return the data (a power that has not been used to date) but unlike the United States, it does not itself develop on government platforms.

In France, the MesInfos project initiated in 2011 conducted experiments as early as 2013 but on a small group of volunteers (300 people). The pilot on a larger scale only started in 2016 and will still involve a limited group (3000 people) at the end of 2017. If para-public institutions were indeed part of the partners (the CNIL in particular), the restitution of data inscribed in the Digital Republic Law has not yet been carried as a project to be deployed by the government. The progressive work of experimentation, prototyping and testing was perhaps also desired by the partners in the early years.

The political meaning of the sector approach

MesInfos first proposed a global approach, "cross-sectors" unlike the United States which started by deploying the Blue Button in the health sector, then extended it to energy (Green Button), student loans, etc. As for the United Kingdom, several sectors were addressed from the beginning of the project but in a relatively independent way.

United States: commercial interests intersect with users' interests and government social and environmental priorities

The choice of priority areas for data reporting reveals different contexts and priorities. The restitution of health data allows Americans to better understand their health, and therefore a priori to better understand their physical health and the expenses related to it. This is one of the axes of improving access to health care, a priority of the Obama administration. The same is true for the Green Button, where the concern is as much to offer a service to help manage the energy budget as a tool for environmental preservation. The initiatives, sector by sector, correspond to government action (access to health, education, training, environmental protection).

The incentive logic of the industrialists was based on the levers of competition so that the players would get involved: this was possible through a knock-on effect ("if the others offer this service, then I must also offer it to remain competitive").

United Kingdom: introducing competition and creating growth

The return of data in 2011 is presented by the government as an evolution of society that must be seized as an economic opportunity:

"This is the way the world is going and the UK is currently leading the change. We see a real opportunity here, but others, including the US and EU, are also showing real interest in the programme and the economic benefits it can deliver. So if we want to continue leading the way, we need to develop a platform upon which the innovation and services that drive growth can be built. midata aims to do just that."

"This is the way the world is moving, and the UK is leading the change. We see a real opportunity, but others, such as the US and the EU, are expressing an interest in our program and the economic benefits that it can bring. If we are to continue to lead, we need to develop a platform on which innovation and growth-creating services can be built. This is precisely what midata is all about."

The fact that the midata project is led by the department of commerce and innovation reveals the economic stakes: creating levers for growth, introducing competition, supporting SMEs, etc. Four strategic sectors (energy, telephony and internet, banking - current account, banking - bank cards) have been chosen for their economic characteristics: these sectors are regulated and tend to be oligopolistic. The challenge initially announced by the government is to reintroduce competition by facilitating the change of operator through better information and simplified formalities, to open these sectors for the creation of new innovative companies and third party services and to allow consumers to make more efficient economic decisions (" getting the best deal "). The implementation of the strategy goes in this direction: the third-party services developed are price comparison services that take into account the personal information of users.

The government has therefore taken a strategic, economic approach to data restitution. The initiative is geared towards the private sector, with third-party industry services such as online comparators.

France: creating new uses and empathy

In France, the FING is proposing a pilot project that includes energy, telephone and internet, insurance, and banking data (provided that the user has data from the project partners). The complex collection objectives pursued by the FING push to adopt this global approach. The richness of data and the possibility of crossing them is a condition for the rise in competence of individuals thanks to their own data and the emergence of new services.

The examples of services imagined or designed give an overview of the different dimensions of empouvoirement: a platform grouping promotional offers on personalized criteria, mapping of the places most frequented by the user, playful visualization of his food consumption, calculating his carbon footprint, a brand/consumer social network, saving expenses, dynamic carpooling, ...

The MesInfos project explores in a broader way the potential use of data restitution and the benefits for users. It is the only project for which PIMS is the first third-party service. The economic and commercial stakes are less present than in the UK and the US. While waiting for a government strategy on the subject, the few private players who have taken up the subject seem to be relaying this global approach, insisting on the bond of trust between the organization and its customers.

Conclusion

In Europe, the United Kingdom and France have been forerunners on the subject of personal data control and restitution, but each has developed very different approaches: smart disclosure in the United States and the United Kingdom, Self Data in France. In the continuity of European data protection regulations, and in the spirit of the Digital Republic law, the MesInfos project proposes a unique approach by developing a 360° vision and by articulating a PIMS.

These initiatives have gradually been emulated. The networks of actors working on these initiatives are being structured and exchanging their experiences and best practices. Finland has launched work within MyDataFi, and has created a network, MyDataAlliance, supported by the Helsinki Institute for ICT and the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The network is presented as "an open community that advances the MyData pilots and shares knowledge and resources". In Belgium, an ecosystem has been created around the personal platform DataMixer and promotes the personal data economy. A qualitative survey on the MyData pilot will be available soon.

Références :

Sources

A look back at personal data control initiatives: Self Data, personal cloud

In France, the Metropolis of Greater Lyon is the first local authority to have joined the Mes Infos experimentation of the FING, a project of personal data restitution which includes today 2300 testers on the French territory.

The security and protection of personal data is an issue of growing concern to Internet users. Moreover, they are seeing their personal data volume increase: applications, digitization of services (energy, health, administration, etc.), social networks, etc. However, this data remains isolated in the silos of the services to which Internet users subscribe. Providing real means of control over personal data is a subject that has been the subject of experimentation for several years, notably in France (MesInfos), in the United States (My Data Initiatives), in the United Kingdom (midata) or in Finland (MyData Finland). This article reviews the concepts, tools and feedback from these movements.

Personal data control: concepts and tools

Self Data, Smart Disclosure, Quantified Self, Personal Data Economy: what are the differences?

"Self Data" is a concept that aims to put the individual back at the center of data management. It was developed by the FING in 2015 in its second experimentation report. Self Data includes "the production, exploitation and sharing of personal data by individuals, under their control and for their own purposes". This term is not (yet) used in Anglo-Saxon countries, which are developing the concepts of"Quantified Self" and"Personal Data Economy", "Smart Disclosure" and " VRM".

Self Data puts forward the access to data as a condition of power to act. It is a complex notion, which covers many possible uses and benefits (economic, recreational, political, personal,...); Quantified Self induces a statistical approach of the individual to his activities, because it designates the practice of "self measurement". It refers to a movement born in California that consists in knowing oneself better by measuring data related to one's body and activities. The Personal Data Economy, on the other hand, directs the debate towards the economic opportunities of the control of personal data by individuals, i.e. the market of products and services created or affected by the reorganization of the collection, management and sharing of personal data. Smart Disclosure is when a company or government department provides users of their services with periodic access to their personal data in an open format that can be reused to make more informed decisions, which is similar to the notion of Self Data. Smart Disclosure, Self Data, Quantified Self and Personal Data Economy have a lot of overlap but reflect different approaches to personal data control, each emphasizing one or the other aspect of personal data control.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) advocates the idea that customers can become traders of their own data or manage the uses they wish to make of it, thus reversing the CRM paradigm in which all customer data is centralized and managed by the company. Organizations can benefit by improving data quality, breaking out of data silos for a more global view of the consumer, recreating a relationship of trust, but also positioning themselves on new markets for personal data services (as MAIF is experimenting with Cozy Cloud). VRM was initially explored within the VRM Project at Harvard University in the United States.

This concept was developed by Doc Searls in the United States as part of the "VRM project". This concept has been taken up and promoted by the FING. It is now the subject of articles on certain specialized marketing sites and has also been included in the conclusions of the 2016 Publicis ETO Intrusion Barometer: "If this approach still seems utopian today, it nevertheless has the merit of showing the direction. Consumers are maturing and are increasingly aware of the value of their data and the interest of brands in this information. We should no longer hesitate to provide them with the means to better manage their relationship with the brand."

The tools of personal data control

To implement the concept of Self Data (or its equivalents), individuals need to control their data:
  • storage space
  • a connection
  • ergonomic organization and management tools
  • a coherent way to share them
The personal cloud is one of the answers: an individual's data and documents are stored and accessed via a personal space with secure and decentralized storage. This personal cloud translates into a type of tool called the Personal Data Management System, better known as PIMS, a personal server that centralizes all the user's personal information. This server gathers all of the user's favorite applications and data and allows them to share their data with third-party services.

The European Data Protection Supervisor published an "Opinion on Personal Information management Systems (PIMS)" on October 20, 2016, in which he very clearly calls on the Union to support them. They "contribute to a sustainable and ethical use of big data as well as to the effective implementation of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)," in particular through the right of access and portability. For companies that process data, they can "help them comply with the GPDR" while "reducing the cost of access" to "complete, targeted and quality data."

3 pioneering experiments

MyInfo in France

The FING and several partners are exploring Self Data, which is defined as "the production, exploitation and sharing of personal data by individuals, under their control and for their own purposes: to know themselves better, to make better decisions, to evaluate their past decisions, to make their life easier..." via the MyInfos project.

The Fing has been exploring the potential of Self Data for 4 years. In 2016, a small group of companies and public actors launched a pilot: data holders return to their customers/users the data they have on them, in a perennial way. The data returned to individuals is multiple: mobility data, consumption data, communication data, insurance data, ... They can be recovered and processed under the control of individuals in their PIMS (Personal Information Management System). MesInfos explores and experiments an approach covering several sectors in order to move towards a 360° approach. The pilot mobilizes all the stakeholders of the Self Data value chain: data holders, service providers (developers, start-ups, companies, ...), "early adopter" individuals, researchers and practitioners, ...

Work and experiments from 2012 to 2016

 2011 and 2012: exploration

The work on Self Data started with an observation: the broken trust of the French regarding the use of their personal data by service providers and applications. Workshops, intelligence work and creative explorations were conducted to identify the types of data concerned that could fall within the scope of personal data control, the areas of use for individuals from their data (management, control, self-knowledge, awareness, decision and action, contribution), the potential benefits as well as the risks.

The project partners relied on a review of the French and international literature on the subject, on meetings with the Midata project (United Kingdom), with the VRM project (United States), and with French researchers, experts and entrepreneurs, and on the results of creative workshops organized to carry out this inventory. The identification of the families of uses was done by analyzing and crossing the pioneer services of management and use of personal data, the ideas of the innovation communities, the consultation of researchers,...

November 2012 - June 2013: time for experimentation

The first experimentation took place in 2012-13. It brought together eight large companies, 300 testers, 1 charter of MesInfos principles, 1 team of researchers. Innovation competitions were organized to propose third-party applications and services that would give users the opportunity to get to know each other better. A secure personal cloud was created and made available and the 8 companies involved in the project gave back their information to the testers during 8 months. At the end of this period, the data restitution stopped and the personal spaces were closed.

2014-2015: preparation for scaling up

The experimentation allowed us to learn from the observation of users, data holders and third party services and to identify the challenges around Self Data, including the business model of third party services and the legal aspects (informed consent, restitution to the right person,...).

In 2015, MesInfos Energie and MesInfos Santé were launched in order to deepen these issues, working in the long term and in detail. For these projects, the FING was inspired by the American movement (Blue Button and Green Button). But in the French approach, the cross-referencing of data remains the cardinal point insofar as it is the cross-referencing that offers a value-added service. A mapping of energy and health data was carried out as a first step: these mappings show the variety of the data concerned as well as their heterogeneity. The data directly related to the theme obviously appear under several categories and context, reference, standard and of course profile data, more general, are also listed.

The second step aimed at exploring the possible uses of these data. Finally, the third step consisted of a synthesis for each project, outlining the potential use cases and the challenges of their implementation.

2016: launch of the MesInfos pilot

In 2016, legislative advances (enshrinement of the right to portability of individuals' data at the national and international level), the encouraging results of experiments, and the consolidation of an international network of self data players led to the decision to launch the MesInfos pilot.

Several organizations, such as MAIF, Orange and EDF, have agreed to return their data to their customers on a permanent basis. These partners are creating APIs so that users can interface with their platforms. Other organizations will join the initiative: Engie, GrDF, EDF, Enédis, Crédit Coopératif, BNP. The MesInfos pilot started with 300 testers and had 2,300 in October 2017. One territory, Greater Lyon, has also joined the process. Although administrative data is still relatively absent from the experiments, this local anchoring should encourage their development.

Some of the services created in 2013 will be reactivated. Others have developed but due to the lack of API on many services, they offer "workaround" features: data "scrapping" (image analysis).

The pilot is accompanied by researchers in marketing, sociology of uses and ergonomists.

NB: If MesInfos Energie has been integrated into the pilot, MesInfos Santé remains independent for the moment insofar as health data are much more sensitive than energy data: the experimentation requires support for the testers, an educational exploration and an installation of the platform on a secure local server. The project has been renamed "My Data My Health" and is now supported by Cap Digital in collaboration with the Fing.

Midata in the UK

The Midata project in the United Kingdom set out to "leverage the economic potential for businesses to shift their customer relationships from a one-sided approach to data collection to a shared approach based on mutual trust . Launched in 2011 on a voluntary basis, it brought together 26 private partners alongside regulatory bodies. The sectors targeted were energy, personal current accounts, credit cards and mobile telephony. It led to the establishment of a regulatory framework(Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act) in 2013 that strengthened the ability of the government to require data to be opened up from companies in the four sectors covered by the program. To date, this enforcement power has not been implemented.

Preparatory work on potential demand in 2012

In 2012, the English government conducted a focus group and telephone study to detect the potential behaviors and needs of a midata service. The study found that the attractiveness of the midata offering is influenced by a few main elements:
  • a large number of activities carried out during the week
  • the habit of comparing prices and offers
  • willingness to change products or services easily
  • willingness to conduct online transactions
The main benefits perceived a priori by the focus groups are saving time, money and life comfort, and less so the concern for decision support, understanding one's finances or transparency and ethics. Those most in favor of collecting, cross-referencing and sharing their data are in the 25-34 age group. The 18-24 year olds are less so, which can be explained in part by the fact that their financial and administrative situations are often simpler. Finally, the importance of reassuring potential users with security measures and guarantees regarding the use and sharing of their data is essential.

Results

The government proceeded via calls to action andcalls for evidence to implement and monitor the project. A call for evidence in the energy sector was issued in December 2016 to inform the preparation of regulatory work.

A status report on the project was conducted in 2014 in the form of a written survey of companies in order to learn about their initiatives in terms of making data available to consumers and their results. In the banking sector (current accounts and credit cards), the information made available is in PDF format. Banks' concerns about the security of the data in case of sharing with third parties was identified as a major obstacle. As for the very low switching rate for current accounts, it seems to be linked to the lack of tools available to consumers to compare offers, the cause of which is the absence of data available in a compatible format.

In the energy sector, the electricity suppliers, more or less established on the market, had made efforts to make available data series in a compatible format. However, not all of the existing comparators on the market offered the possibility to analyze midata files.

Cell phone data is most often available in .pdf format (few operators offer to download data in a machine-readable and reusable format). However, many offer comparison sites exist and some of them already offer automated access to detailed data.

Regarding personal data protection issues, working groups including companies, online comparison services, consumer groups and public authorities have issued recommendations that mainly include consumer information and notification of rights as well as risks of certain services and ongoing monitoring and discussion of the ethics of personal data use.

This initiative gave birth in 2015 to two commercial services, price comparison in the financial services sector(Gocompare) and energy(The Voltz App) incorporating consumers' personal data (if they so choose).

Several sectoral initiatives in the United States

In 2010, the United States launched a number of sector-specific data return initiatives, grouped under the name My Data Initiatives. They include: The administration's March 2016 review of My Data Initiatives shows the following results:
  • More than 3 million veterans, government employees and Medicare beneficiaries have access to their personal health data (more than 46 million accesses)
  • Approximately 150 million Americans have access to their health records, including information from health care providers, medical labs, pharmacies, and vaccines. The majority of health insurance companies offer online access to information and more than 16,000 health organizations are listed on Blue Button Connector (a tool that helps patients access their information online)
  • More than 150 energy providers have committed to making a Green Button available to over 60 million homes and businesses. Money savings and environmental impact are at the forefront of the benefits.
  • Any American enrolled in the free online "my Social Security" service can download a copy of their Social Security return. This document can be shared with a financial advisor or with software to help with financial planning for retirement.
  • Finally, millions of students and their parents use MyStudentData and fafsa.gov data about their student loan balances, scholarships, enrollment and payment information to help them manage their loan repayment or choose which college to attend.
The authors of the article noted several areas for further development of the approach: sharing patient data for research purposes, and steering the data management policy of federal agencies by the General Service Administration and developing a secure authentication service (connect.gov, the equivalent of France Connect).

Specificities and differences between data privacy initiatives

Consumers are not like other users

The FING has listed the categories of benefits since its first exploration booklet (2013). We rely on this list to evaluate the benefits put forward by the project leaders through the communication elements (press releases, websites, studies). The benefits are listed below:
  • Control: protect your data, know what you know about yourself in order to correct it or have it deleted, control what you transmit or not...
  • Management and convenience: manage your documents and paperwork; update your data automatically with your contacts; automatically fill out online forms while controlling what you send or don't send to each company...
  • Self-knowledge: follow the evolution of your sports performance; understand the mechanisms that influence your mood or your health; tell yourself about your week through the places you have been, the things you have bought and the things you have done online; take stock of your skills and "employability"; compare yourself to others on the criteria that matter to you...
  • Awareness: calculate your ecological footprint and make practical choices (energy, mobility, consumption...) to reduce it; manage to consume organic or "ethical" without spending hours or paying too much...
  • Decision and action: compare offers according to one's lifestyle (for example, telephone rates according to one's actual mobile communications history), choose a place to live, express one's projects or purchasing intentions at a market and wait for proposals from several suppliers; organize one's time and travel, optimize one's overall energy consumption, manage one's budget and finances, declare one's taxes in two clicks, send a personalized CV, renegotiate contracts...
  • Contribution: make your health data available for a clinical study (as do the users of PatientsLikeMe), your mobility data for dynamic urban mapping, your geolocation to feed Open Street Maps...
  • Live an experience: discover, feel, share, live a playful and emotional experience thanks to the data.
Source: Self Data exploration notebooks N°1 (text) and N°2 (graph)

Purchasing power: the point of convergence between the three approaches

In this respect, the words used to designate the beneficiaries of these services clearly reveal the approaches of each party: in the United Kingdom, we speak of "consumers", in France, of "users" and in the United States, alternately of "Americans" and "consumers". In the first two cases, the bias is clearly illustrated. The term "Americans" is used to designate both citizens and consumers.

All the studies point to a key benefit of personal data restitution: saving money, which belongs to the "Decision and Action" category in the FING typology. The English study conducted in 2012 on the potential demand for data restitution services argues that "the future of midata will be determined by the availability to the consumer of products or applications that clearly appear to him as solutions for saving time and money". As the first services developed are price comparison services, it is the consumer who is the first target of the project.

In the United States, purchasing power is a recurring theme. The first initiative concerns the health sector, a key public issue under the Obama administration. The American health care model is largely dominated by private organizations: health care management is therefore a direct financial issue for Americans. In the energy sector, the Green Button is largely relayed by industrialists (who have joined together in the Green Button Alliance) who put forward the economic argument for the various target audiences, except for communities (owners and tenants, companies, developers). However, other benefits are put forward, as we will see later.

In France, the question of economic gain is present but it is put on the same level as other benefits in the FING's communication.

Other profit categories treated differently

In the UK, the dominant economic approach, the benefits for consumers have been described above. The other category of benefits does not join the FING typology which concerns users, but concerns the market and more specifically SMEs, developers, entrepreneurs: this new segment creates opportunities to develop new services and acquire excellence. It is a British specificity to make this benefit a central element of the strategy and the discourse.

For the US, several benefits are covered, but they vary depending on the initiative. The U.S. government's approaches to electronic health data(health IT, Precision Medicine Initiative) highlight each of the benefits listed: Data protection and security, "better information for better care," "makes health care more convenient," "update your medical record," "improves research and health tracking across the country," ... In the area of education data(Education data Initiative, MyStudentData), the benefits announced in 2012 were to "help consumers make more informed decisions and improve learning outcomes" i.e., to have better self-awareness and optimize decisions and action.

MesInfos presents on its website the concept of Self Data and develops the multiple benefits. In the introduction, it is still the management assistance, the decision and the action that are put forward. Some of the pilot's partners have begun to communicate: MAIF highlights the value of trust, which is close to the benefit of "controlling one's data"; as does Orange, which talks about "giving back control [of personal data] to users". The benefit Living an experience is an addition in V2, we can conclude that this benefit had not been identified in the "theoretical" work of 2012 and that it appeared with the experimentation of 2012-13.

The degrees of state intervention

The United States and the United Kingdom have launched pioneering initiatives (2009 and 2011 respectively) coordinated by the public authorities from the outset. MesInfos, launched in 2012 and supported by an association, the FING, has benefited from the feedback of each of these projects, and has been able to develop its own approach.

From incentive to legislation

The degree of government involvement is different in each initiative. In the United States, the government has encouraged organizations to set up "buttons" and use standards, making room for a voluntary approach. The industry has taken advantage of this incentive: today, the Green Button Alliance is composed almost exclusively of private players who are leading the work on energy and water data standards. This is also due to the fact that the role of the State is much smaller than that of the European welfare states, and therefore the actions towards these sectors are competitive and therefore economic issues.

In England, the government has been slower. Surveys and task forces are being conducted to make the necessary decisions at the state level. Two years after the first "calls to action", it legislated in 2013 by introducing in theEnterprise and Regulatory Reform Act the possibility for public authorities to ask companies to return their data. He also took over on the issue of standards and interoperability; seeing none appear, it is the government that proposes one for industry. It should be noted that in 2014 the public authorities did not

A correlation between state involvement and the speed and scale of deployment

In the United States, the availability of data restitution services on a large scale has been rapid: regarding the Blue Button, 1,000,000 veterans had used it only 3 years after the first official discussions and today more than 3 million people have access to their personal health data. But also, 16,000 health organizations offer the data return service. In addition, initiatives are gradually spreading to other sectors and the federal government is providing support to facilitate and secure user authentication. The administration has not acted directly on requiring companies to implement initiatives, but it has called for action. On the other hand, its driving role is undeniable insofar as it was the administrative services (Veterans Affairs, Medicare) that first offered the opportunity to return data. These opportunities helped to create a call for private initiative.

In England, several data reporting services are available. The key performance indicators identified in 2014 by the government were:

  • Availability of data in a standardized and compatible format
  • In the energy and banking sectors (current accounts), the switching rate illustrates an effect of data restitution. This is an end goal rather than a means goal.
  • Number of downloads
  • The rate of use of the comparators
No precise figures are given, but it seems that since the services are available to consumers, many millions of British people have access to these services. The government conducts studies, poses issues and challenges, specifies the framework, and has given itself the power to compel companies to put in place the means to return the data (a power that has not been used to date) but unlike the United States, it does not itself develop on government platforms.

In France, the MesInfos project initiated in 2011 conducted experiments as early as 2013 but on a small group of volunteers (300 people). The pilot on a larger scale only started in 2016 and will still involve a limited group (3000 people) at the end of 2017. If para-public institutions were indeed part of the partners (the CNIL in particular), the restitution of data inscribed in the Digital Republic Law has not yet been carried as a project to be deployed by the government. The progressive work of experimentation, prototyping and testing was perhaps also desired by the partners in the early years.

The political meaning of the sector approach

MesInfos first proposed a global approach, "cross-sectors" unlike the United States which started by deploying the Blue Button in the health sector, then extended it to energy (Green Button), student loans, etc. As for the United Kingdom, several sectors were addressed from the beginning of the project but in a relatively independent way.

United States: commercial interests intersect with users' interests and government social and environmental priorities

The choice of priority areas for data reporting reveals different contexts and priorities. The restitution of health data allows Americans to better understand their health, and therefore a priori to better understand their physical health and the expenses related to it. This is one of the axes of improving access to health care, a priority of the Obama administration. The same is true for the Green Button, where the concern is as much to offer a service to help manage the energy budget as a tool for environmental preservation. The initiatives, sector by sector, correspond to government action (access to health, education, training, environmental protection).

The incentive logic of the industrialists was based on the levers of competition so that the players would get involved: this was possible through a knock-on effect ("if the others offer this service, then I must also offer it to remain competitive").

United Kingdom: introducing competition and creating growth

The return of data in 2011 is presented by the government as an evolution of society that must be seized as an economic opportunity:

"This is the way the world is going and the UK is currently leading the change. We see a real opportunity here, but others, including the US and EU, are also showing real interest in the programme and the economic benefits it can deliver. So if we want to continue leading the way, we need to develop a platform upon which the innovation and services that drive growth can be built. midata aims to do just that."

"This is the way the world is moving, and the UK is leading the change. We see a real opportunity, but others, such as the US and the EU, are expressing an interest in our program and the economic benefits that it can bring. If we are to continue to lead, we need to develop a platform on which innovation and growth-creating services can be built. This is precisely what midata is all about."

The fact that the midata project is led by the department of commerce and innovation reveals the economic stakes: creating levers for growth, introducing competition, supporting SMEs, etc. Four strategic sectors (energy, telephony and internet, banking - current account, banking - bank cards) have been chosen for their economic characteristics: these sectors are regulated and tend to be oligopolistic. The challenge initially announced by the government is to reintroduce competition by facilitating the change of operator through better information and simplified formalities, to open these sectors for the creation of new innovative companies and third party services and to allow consumers to make more efficient economic decisions (" getting the best deal "). The implementation of the strategy goes in this direction: the third-party services developed are price comparison services that take into account the personal information of users.

The government has therefore taken a strategic, economic approach to data restitution. The initiative is geared towards the private sector, with third-party industry services such as online comparators.

France: creating new uses and empathy

In France, the FING is proposing a pilot project that includes energy, telephone and internet, insurance, and banking data (provided that the user has data from the project partners). The complex collection objectives pursued by the FING push to adopt this global approach. The richness of data and the possibility of crossing them is a condition for the rise in competence of individuals thanks to their own data and the emergence of new services.

The examples of services imagined or designed give an overview of the different dimensions of empouvoirement: a platform grouping promotional offers on personalized criteria, mapping of the places most frequented by the user, playful visualization of his food consumption, calculating his carbon footprint, a brand/consumer social network, saving expenses, dynamic carpooling, ...

The MesInfos project explores in a broader way the potential use of data restitution and the benefits for users. It is the only project for which PIMS is the first third-party service. The economic and commercial stakes are less present than in the UK and the US. While waiting for a government strategy on the subject, the few private players who have taken up the subject seem to be relaying this global approach, insisting on the bond of trust between the organization and its customers.

Conclusion

In Europe, the United Kingdom and France have been forerunners on the subject of personal data control and restitution, but each has developed very different approaches: smart disclosure in the United States and the United Kingdom, Self Data in France. In the continuity of European data protection regulations, and in the spirit of the Digital Republic law, the MesInfos project proposes a unique approach by developing a 360° vision and by articulating a PIMS.

These initiatives have gradually been emulated. The networks of actors working on these initiatives are being structured and exchanging their experiences and best practices. Finland has launched work within MyDataFi, and has created a network, MyDataAlliance, supported by the Helsinki Institute for ICT and the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The network is presented as "an open community that advances the MyData pilots and shares knowledge and resources". In Belgium, an ecosystem has been created around the personal platform DataMixer and promotes the personal data economy. A qualitative survey on the MyData pilot will be available soon.

Références :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
A look back at personal data control initiatives: Self Data, personal cloud