Web and mobile phone users willingly share personal data in exchange for free stuff, but not everyone is ready to throw in the towel on privacy
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With all of the mobile apps, Web sites and free services clamoring for your personal data, whereabouts and preferences, it might seem as though privacy is at death’s door. Not so. Several projects underway aim to provide virtual lockboxes or screening technologies that can help people to reassert control over their digital lives. In general, privacy-enhancing approaches to online data sharing require any company, app developer or government agency that wants to know more about you to ask permission for access to specific information. The rest of your data stay locked away. Services such as Britain’s Mydex offer the ability to store, manage and share personal information in an encrypted central repository called a data store, which only the person who creates the store can fully access. Anyone wanting information contained within that personal data store—an insurance company or marketer, for example—must connect to Mydex’s network and agree to terms of use created by the person owning the data before Mydex will release it. Personal, based in Washington, D.C., offers a similar “data vault” service.