Who owns your private online data? You of course, but do you currently benefit from it? With or without your knowledge some popular web companies make billions of dollars from your personal data scattered across the web. The many sites you visit, the videos you watch, the purchases you make and the items you reward with a Facebook “like” or a Google “+1” — all of that, and more melds together into a data set that lets web companies make huge sums of money. Most of it from target advertising.
Personal and Singly are two of the few personal online data management startups that seeks to help you manage your web data.
Personal enables individuals to own, control access to and benefit from their personal information bouncing around the digital world. It allows you to import data from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and info like their web-browsing histories and purchases to a secure “data vault.
The site organizes the data in category-specific, encrypted “gems,” which let people easily search their own information or grant permission to share it with others. Easily search for anything in your gems. Enjoy real time updates across your network when you grant and request access to others’ data.
Singly on the other hand lets users compile all their data in one place via the The Locker Project.(an open source personal data platform). Singly aggregates and stores your personal data from around the web and ensures that it’s always available to you. The Locker Project captures what’s called exhaust data from users’ activities around the web and offline via sensors and put it firmly in their own possession and then allow them to run local apps that are built to leverage their data.
How the Locker Project works
Users will be able to download the data capture and storage code and run it on their own server, or sign up for hosted service – like WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Then the service will pull in and archive all kinds of data that the user has permission to access and store into the user’s personal Locker: Tweets, photos, videos, click-stream, check-ins, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, health records and financial records like transaction histories.
