The University of Oxford recently hosted a small workshop on “midata”, the UK Government’s programme to try and give UK consumers better access to the personal data corporations hold about them. The broad aim is to give consumers access to usage data (such as energy and gas bills, phone contracts, credit card statements) in a standard electronic form so that they can find out if they should switch to a different service provider and save money. Midata started earlier this year in partnership with a wide range of companies, including energy suppliers (British Gas, EDF Energy), mobile operators (Three), banks and payments companies (Lloyds Banking Group, Visa, MasterCard) as well as market comparison services such as MoneySupermarket.com and billmonitor. A full list is available on the Department for Business Innovation and Skills midata website.
What has this got to do with webinos? One of the principles behind midata is that consumers should have secure electronic access to their personal data, and be able to give it to trusted third-party applications for analysis and follow-on services. Data should be stored by the user and stay in their control. This is exactly the same approach that webinos is taking: users will have their own personal zone, with personal data storage and access control policies dictating which applications are allowed to view each record. Moreover, webinos-enabled applications will be able to give users secure access to this information from all of their devices, enabling people on the move to take advantage of any opportunities to get a better deal.
webinos can also potentially enhance the data collected through use of its context database. Contextual data about where people are, what they do frequently and who they interact with might be useful for identifying new discounts and cost-saving deals. For example, a webinos-enabled analysis app might identify that your credit card company offers a discount for purchases at a shop you frequently visit, or that you could save money by getting your car serviced by the same mechanic as your friend with the same model. Combining this with the future potential of smart cities may open up even more possibilities.
Web applications already exist to do some of the things midata is trying to encourage. Mydex and billmonitor both being interesting examples. However, all applications require users to make a leap of faith: they must trust them with a great deal of their personal data. This could potentially be misused by advertisers or by criminals performing identity theft or social engineering attacks. Many of the features being developed and investigated by webinos might help mitigate these problems: with better privacy statements and flexible access control policies, the impact of any malicious application can be reduced. webinos aims to make it easier for users to know what applications they are installing, who they are sharing data with, and how they can stop sharing if they want to.
(This post originally appeared on our posterous blog)
John Lyle
Bio
John Lyle is a post-doctoral research assistant at The Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. His interests are in information security and privacy, in particular the use of secure hardware to create trusted systems. He recently submitted his DPhil thesis on the subject of Trustworthy Web Services and holds an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London.
Webinos interests
John works full-time on the webinos project and is primarily involved with the security and privacy architecture.
