Future The history of the data economy vision of a delightfully quirky project called BBC Box. In 2019, a research and development team within the BBC created a hexagonal box with a whiff of Dr Whos Tardis containing a Raspberry Pi computer that ran a personal data-management system named Databox. The idea was that personal data from a range of different digital services would be stored within the BBC Box, and it would be up to the user to decide which other apps and computer programs could access and process that data. For example, the BBC developed its own Profiler app that would produce an anonymised profile of the boxs owner. That profile but not the data could be exported by the user to a system to produce recommendations of TV shows the user might like. Starting from the premise that were the BBC, and we have a duty of care not just to our contributors, but to our audience as well preserving peoples privacy is part of that duty of care, says Bill Thompson, principal research engineer at BBC R&D. We are examining models for developing audience insights that dont require us to know anything about you, but that let you tell us enough about yourself [to build a model giving] a more granular and useful understanding of our audience than we would get by knowing about you particularly. Obviously, its not necessary to have a physical container in which to store your data. A virtual container would work just as well. The internet of the future could be a honeycomb of data cells, each one containing an individuals personal data. The creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is looking at exactly that model. Concerned that the internet has become a machine for monetised surveillance, rather than an ecosystem of cooperative sharing, he has been working on a new vision of the web, called Solid with the name derived from the phrase social linked data. Solid started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now has its own start-up Inrupt to take it closer to fruition. Meanwhile, the same BBC R&D team that built BBC Box is working on an experimental pod-based personal data store (PDS) approach to recommendations, called My PDS. Like the BBC Box, the idea is that each pod pulls together data from different sources BBC iPlayer, Spotify and Netflix to create a media profile to which the user can, if they want, grant access to other BBC apps, such as the BBC Sounds app. All of these projects are experimental prototypes. In Europe, such ideas have been given a leg-up thanks to the right to data portability enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This right is described by the UK Information Commissioners Office as allowing individuals to obtain and reuse their personal data for their own purposes across different services. Many prototype PDS designs have been built to facilitate this sort of sharing and reuse of data. Some include a dashboard for terms and conditions, so users can be alerted if these change after data has been shared. Others include a token that travels with the data, like a watermark in a digital photograph, specifying what permission has been agreed for its use. One app, CitizenMe, lets individuals collect data about themselves in a PDS and offer it to places where it could be useful. The first place is market consumer insights, obviously, says chief executive StJohn Deakins, because if youve got a large cohort of people with lots and lots of deep multivariate personal data, you can drive a huge amount of insight off the top of that. CitizenMe users might receive offers to share data and answer questions for cash, and they can donate data for good causes, or participate in studies that give them information about themselves. Deakins says he learned that people dont really care about the data, but they care about the stories that data tells especially about themselves, or people theyre close to. Liz Brandt, chief executive at Ctrl-Shift, sees many opportunities arising from GDPRs right to data 38 Impact ISSUE 36 2022_pp36-39_DataEconomy.indd 38 08/12/2021 10:09