FEB 27 Notes from Cary Open Data Day: The Concept of "My Data"

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Recently +Laura James brought up a concept that I have seen floating around. The concept of "My Data" and "Open Data". She wrote on the OKFN blog here: blog.okfn.org/2013/02/22/open-data-my-data.

Now while I was speaking at the Cary Open Data Day during our policy session and gentleman asked me a questions about personal data. This started with my keynote remarks regarding privacy policy and privacy in practice. In my remarks I discussed some of the diagrams used by +David Eaves to explain the difference between personal data and open data. David used wonderful Venn diagrams to show where personal data and open government data intersect. I have provided a link to this great post on personal data here:http://eaves.ca/2013/01/07/the-journal-https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5930427769440764073#editor/target=post;postID=706240073538139688news-gun-map-open-vs-personal-data/

This set off a series of questions about how privacy works in the real world, how we can possibly protect the identity of citizens and citizen information or as it has been said by the OKFN, Eaves, the ODI and countless others "Personal Data". I was frank. I know the UK is working on satisfying its own privacy policy and is in discussions with privacy advocates as to practical steps toward satisfying the public need for personal data privacy.

Like transparency I feel there is no ultimate state of total privacy. We can redact personally identifiable information from a data set. Some data sets contain location data. Some data sets contain event data and location data. One could mine these sets and quickly identify a person using cross-linking and some general search information found through popular search engines.

This led to the discussion of "My Data" as mentioned in Laura James' blog as well as a new article by Eaves on accessing one's own personal data: http://eaves.ca/2013/01/07/the-journal-news-gun-map-open-vs-personal-data/. The question was asked by the gentleman at the end of the table. "I want to download my personal data."

How do we do that? I am not sure. I am in the middle of implementing a service oriented architecture project to try and decouple our business processes from applications. This has several benefits.

1. creates an abstraction layer that allows me to merge data sets for reuse on the open data portal
2. Allows the enterprise to create concatenation withing disparate data sets to perhaps allow for the mining of data to crate "My Data" access points
3. Allows applications and business processes talk to each other using reusable web services rather the one to one EAI type data connectors.

A lot to think about. Open Data, Personal Data and now My Data.

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