We All Need a Personal Private Digital Space of Our Own

.... I guess abbreviated to PPDS

I said back in this post that I had a proposed new name for what we had previously called ‘a Personal Data Store’. Of course such things have also been variously called ‘Personal Data Services’, Personal Information Management Services (PIMS), Pods, and no doubt more. I don’t see the evolving names as a problem; they just reflect improved understanding of the requirement, and indeed changes in the requirements themselves as technology enables that.

You’ll have gathered from the post title my new proposal is an evolution and extension. I believe we should think of the fundamental capability that needs to be built as a Personal Private Digital Space. Each word is important, and also easy enough to explain and understand:

• Personal: It’s mine, and nobody else’s (although it is possible to enable appropriate joins and aggregations under the owners control)

• Private: Nobody else can or should be able to see what’s in it (unless I give them active and overt permission to see and engage with specific bits of it)

• Digital: It is of the computing world, of chips, transistors, binary data, operating systems, applications, machine learning, AI and touches/ underpins many areas of ‘the personal stack’

• Space: It is ‘an area or extent delimited in some way’, or ‘a physical extent or area, extent in two or three dimensions’ (both options from Oxford English Dictionary)

I’ve come to this conclusion on the name i’ll be using through a lot of recent deep engagement with personal empowerment-tech, personal AI and the inner workings of what can and now is being built in these areas. It goes well beyond ‘data store’. It is also clear from many discussions around the subject of data intermediaries that we need to get ever more detailed around how we define and describe the capabilities that need to be built.

The diagram below is my first attempt at a visual approach to explaining a Personal Private Digital Space.

I’ll save the detail on what’s happening inside the Personal Private Digital Space for another day as there’s a whole lot of new and very fancy stuff going on in there. For now my key point is that we all desperately need such a thing, even if we don’t all realise it as yet.

Of the four words, the one that probably needs most emphasis is PRIVATE. It is critical that people be able to operate in the digital realm without being overlooked, and analysed, and harvested, and optimised and all of the many other such things going on now in the open (wild) web. People need private, digital spaces where they can work through things in their own time, under their own terms (or indeed no terms), undertand their options, make decisions and lots more. And then, only when they are ready, engage outside of the private space as needs be in a controlled, agent-assisted manner. What happens inside the space is no-one’s business other than the individual space owner’s. Think of that like the real world filing cabinets that we all have for important documents. Imagine if the suppliers mentioned in those documents asked to come into your house, have a look in your filing cabinet, take a few pics and used that to optimise their own position and not yours. That does not sound great does it? So why should that model be accepted in the digital realm?

That very broken model needs to go away, and that starts when even a small number of us recognise the need for, and adopt, our own Personal Private Digital Spaces.