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What does mydex do?
We provide a range of services to individuals that let them manage their lives more effectively by equipping them with the means and mechanisms to capture and manage their personal data, analyse it and share it in a fully permission and controlled manager through a hyper secure environment.
What is a Personal Data Store?
A Personal Data Store is a service for individuals that helps them collect, store, manage, use and share their own personal data for their own purposes.
It is, if you like, the equivalent of a company’s ‘data warehouse’ except that it sits on the side of the individual, under the individual’s control. For example, with a Personal Data Store, individuals can decide if they want to share any information with another person or organisation and, if so, what information they want to share with who, for what purposes.
In short, Personal Data Stores are a tool to put individuals in control of their personal data.
How does it work?
A Personal Data Store is a database that’s under the individual’s control.
In one sense, the contacts list on your mobile phone is a ‘Personal Data Store’ – it stores your personal data. Personal Data Stores run with this idea and extend and deepen it in all sorts of ways: the amount of data you can store on it, the sorts of data you can store it, the things you can do with this data.
Personal Data Stores like Mydex are designed to be ‘platform agnostic’. You can have one on your PC. Or your browser. Or your mobile device. Or you can access it via the cloud. The important thing is that it is yours, and no one else has access to it unless you say so.
What sort of data does it hold?
Whatever data you want it to hold — mainly the data you need to store in order to manage life and deal with other people and organisations. Not your personal diary therefore, but forms you fill out, applications, references, transaction receipts, and so on.. This could embrace your health, education, employment and travel records.
Looking forward, we believe organisations will ‘hand back’ data they have collected about individual. For example, in the US, the Obama Administration has already decided to give US Army Veterans their medical health records. As the announcement explains, “Having control of this information enables Veterans to share this data with health care providers, caregivers, or people they trust.”
In this way, Personal Data Stores will become an essential tool for individuals wanting to manage different aspects of their life better: ‘my health’, ‘my money’, ‘my home’, ‘my car’, ‘my holidays’, and so on.
Why should I trust Mydex to hold my data for me?
All the data held in Mydex Personal Data Stores is secured and protected according to the highest available data security and protection standards.
Mydex does not have access to this data. Mydex simply provides the vessel in which to hold the data, the pipelines to share it (in a secure, auditable way), and the taps for individuals to turn this data sharing on and off as they please.
Also, Mydex has been set up as a Community Interest Company. Its main purpose is to serve a social/community benefit. It acts commercially and can make a profit, but most of the profits have to be reinvested in its social ‘cause’. Mydex’s particular social purpoose is to “help individuals realise the value of their personal data”. For more details below.
How much does the Mydex service cost?
The core Personal Data Store is free.
Going forward, we expect many specialist ‘added value’ services to emerge, offering to help individuals manage and use their data more effectively. Some of these services may charge a fee. But we intend always to maintain a free core service to both individuals and organisations.
How does Mydex earn its money?
Mydex can cover its costs in several ways. For example, it will charge organisations a fee for certain data sharing services.
Why has Mydex been set up as a Community Interest Company?
We established Mydex as a Community Interest Company for a very simple reason: trust. For the Personal Data Store concept to work, individuals have to be confident that the service is not just another personal data scam. The best way to do this is to make its commitment to serving the interests of its members legally enforceable.
Community Interest Companies or CICs are legally required to conduct their business for the benefit of the community, and not purely for private advantage. In the case of Mydex, its social purpose is “to help individuals realise the value of their personal data”.
Mydex’s CIC status means two things in particular.
1) Mydex is subject to an ‘asset lock’. This means that none of Mydex’s assets can be transferred to another organisation unless that organisation also is committed to Mydex’s social purpose. This means Mydex has to stick to its social purpose. Forever. It cannot sell itself to another company which then decides to use its assets for a different purpose.
2) As a Community Interest Company it can pay dividends to shareholders, but these dividends are subject to a cap. Currently, the maximum proportion of profits it can distribute to shareholders is 35%. The rest of the profits (if there are any!) have to be reinvested in pursuing the business’ social purpose.
“You say that Mydex will help individuals regain control over their personal data, but individuals have already lost control. There is no way to get it back”
We disagree, for a number of reasons:
- even with the most sophisticated and comprehensive tracking, surveillance and data collecting technologies there are two things organisations collecting personal data can never do: predict what the individual is going to do next; and understand why the individual did what they did. Individuals could provide organisations with this information if they saw good reason to. Mydex makes this possible. But to gain access to such information, organisations have to pay a price: they have to accept the individual’s terms and conditions for data sharing
- whatever data organisations collect about individuals, it will always remain partial and incomplete. Take a simple example. While Amazon knows the books an individual buys from Amazon, it does not know what books that individual buys from other booksellers, so it can never get a fully-rounded picture of that individual’s book buying preferences or habits. Using a Personal Data Store like Mydex, individuals will naturally collect this sort of information. They could share it with Amazon if Amazon accepts their terms for sharing the information
- when an organisation collects data about you and stores it in a database, that data ‘freezes’: it’s a historical record. It does not automatically update itself every time the individual’s life changes. Which means it quickly becomes out-of-date and inaccurate. Because individuals will use their Personal Data Stores to manage their own lives better, they have a vested interest in keeping the data they use up-to-date and accurate
- the more organisations try to gather data about individuals without their knowledge and permission, the more they lose individuals’ trust.
Going forward, we believe most organisations will realise that embracing the new rules of personal data management will help them gain access to much richer, more accurate and more useful customer data at much lower cost.
