Midata - access and control your personal data
BIS is working with leading businesses and consumer groups to give individuals more access to, and control over, the data that companies hold on them. The midata project – part of the Consumer Empowerment Strategy will allow people to view, access and use their personal and transaction data in a way that is portable and safe. This will help consumers get a greater insight into their own spending habits and improve their buying decisions. It will also let everyone take advantage of the growing number of applications that can process this type of data, helping individuals manage their finances or choose products to suit their lifestyle.
The three main objectives of midata are to:
- secure broad private-sector participation in the project, with a key number of businesses agreeing to release individual, personal data to consumers
- let consumers access and use their data in a safe way
- encourage businesses to develop innovative services and applications that will interpret and use the data for consumers
BIS is working with a number of business sectors, including energy, telecommunications, finance and retail. We are looking at maximising interoperability, the potential for common, voluntary standards in areas such as data security, and how different kinds of consumer information might be made available.
The commercial potential for businesses in shifting their customer relationships from a unilateral data-gathering approach to a mutual trust-based sharing one is considerable. By combining data from many different sources and letting consumers add information of their own, businesses have a significant opportunity to help customers create rich, new ‘person-centric’ data assets.
