Report. An EU opinion explores the concept of technologies and ecosystems aiming at empowering individuals to control the sharing of their personal data. The so-called personal data stores entail huge perspectives in supporting data protection principles, but they also face huge challenges such as penetrating a market of ‘free’ services and keeping data secure.
This opinion has decided to call the new trend ‘personal information management systems’ or ‘ PIMS’ for short – others call it Personal Data Stores, PDS, MyData, Selfdata or Vendor Relationshop Management.
The opinion describes what PIMS are, what problems they are intended to solve and how. It analyses how PIMS can contribute to a better protection of personal data and what challenges they face. Finally, it identifies ways forward to build upon the opportunities they offer.
- they face the overarching difficulty of penetrating a market dominated by online services based on business models and technical architectures where individuals are not in control of their data
- they face huge risk regarding storage of data. Centralised storage of all or a very significant portion of a user’s personal data might represent a high risk per se. But also local storage on the device as well as cloud-based services bear their own specific security risks.
The paper concludes: The emerging landscape of PIMS, aiming at putting individuals and consumers back in control of their personal data, deserves consideration, support and further research with a view to contributing to a sustainable and ethical use of big data and to the effective implementation of the principles of the recently adopted GDPR.
