Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

Abstract

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by advertising being the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal concern for us, the subjects of this process. This can cause many harms: privacy infringement, personal and professional embarrassment, restricted access to labour markets, restricted access to highest value pricing, and many others. There is a critical need to provide technologies that enable alternative practices, so that individuals can par- ticipate in the collection, management and consumption of their personal data. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that col- lates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to re- cover control of our online lives. We hope the Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data. </span></p></div></div></div>

Enabling the new economic actor: data protection, the digital economy, and the Databox

“…developing local PDMS rather than cloud-based ones. One such example is provided by the Databox model [25]. At the centre of this model sits a physical device located in the individual's home, which is under the direct control of the individual.…”

Exploring New Metaphors for a Networked World through the File Biography

“…These actions are complemented by two new ones. 'Licensing' conveys an act of sharing whereby permissions are negotiated between the user and some other party, be that a person or a service (this is somewhat akin to the possibilities offered by Databox [1]). 'Giving' refers to the transfer of permissions from one person to another, and could underpin social practices such as gifting, loaning and inheritance.…”

“…Examples include tools that permit the deletion of content regardless of how it has been synced and duplicated [6], entities that articulate a user's data sharing preferences across a fragmented ecosystem of technologies [28], and systems that allow users to specify how services can access their data [1]. As noted in the Introduction, research into virtual possessions has also proposed the 'bundling' of content to form new abstractions [9], and the development of new actions as ways of underpinning ownership, including by reasserting ownership (by, e.g., withdrawing content from an online service) as well as by being able to relinquish it [16,9].…”

Low-cost mobile personal clouds

“…Databox [1] proposes a trusted platform which is designed to allow users to manage and use their own data, grant controlled access to others and offer different support incentive policies for external users. RaspPiPCloud [2] builds on this to propose a novel low cost personal cloud approach hosted ion devices such as Raspberry Pi which allows users to collect, store, query and share their own data.…”

“…Even though the majority of users are not aware of the technical details of what happens to their data once they use cloud services, they are increasingly aware that many service providers analyze their personal data to build profiles which they "trade" with other agencies such as advertising or credit companies [1]. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a mobile low cost, intelligent and adaptive human-centered, personal cloud architecture which allows users to host their services, collect, store and analyse as well as interact with their data and services.…”