More carrot and stick needed for open data


Mark Say writes in The Guardian:

One of the rumbling debates over the past few years, pressed energetically by some privacy activists, has been around potential new models for managing personal data held by government. It was picked up by a few people in the Conservative party before the general election, and has often been attached to warnings about the potential for the state to abuse the existing plethora of databases. With that in mind, it was a surprise last week that the government threw the spotlight onto how the private rather than public sector uses people’s data.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) unveiled its midata initiative, in which a number of companies have agreed to give consumers access to all the data held on them in electronic format. The next step will be the development of online personal data repositories (PDRs) for each customer, which in the longer term (and it’s better to emphasise the ‘longer’) could be brought together into data stores for individuals that draw from different sources.