Personal Data Platform

Software is everywhere

In the form of mobile apps on our smartphone, web applications in our browser or classical applications on our laptop. Most software requires their users to create an account, and often asks them to supply personal data like phone number or address.

We don‘t have an overview

Many people I know, myself included, do not really have an overview about which software they signed up for and which personal data they submitted. All I can say, having a look into my password manager, is that I have over 500 accounts across a variety of services, most of which probably also store some personal data about me.

Our data is replicated

Usually, each service stores the personal data we provide in some proprietary way on their own infrastructure. There is rarely any sharing between services, except for larger platforms like the Apple or Google ecosystems. This seems pretty inefficient to me.

Updating data is a pain

What to do when you‘re moving? Your address changes, and now you need to give your new location to all services that use your old address. Or you switch phone carriers and get a new number. There are at least two problems with this - first, due to the lack of overview, the risk of forgetting a relevant service is pretty high. Second, depending on the amount of services, this can be a lot of manual work.

A platform for personal data

The idea I developed from this is to develop a service that serves as a personal data provider to all other services which need that data. You sign up with the personal data provider, save your address, phone number etc. and your other services and applications integrate with the provider to retrieve this data and stay up to date.

Now, whenever a piece of your data changes, all you need to do (in an ideal world where all of your services are integrated with the data provider) is to notify the data provider, and the changes will automatically be relayed to the other services.

This is the basic idea. I will continue thinking about this and come back to update and refine the concept. An MVP-like implementation of this platform would be quite simple because at it the core it's just a CRUD application.