The project aims to redress the balance of Personal Information (PI) control and management away from large multinationals and put it back in the hands of the people who own it.
Whenever someone uses an App or visits a website, their device can send out Personal Information including device IDs, location and browsing information to thousands of AdTech companies.
In June 2019, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office found that the £1.5bn ad-tech industry, underpinned by Google, Facebook and other billion-dollar companies, was operating illegally. According to a damning report from the UK's data protection regulator, a report reviewing how adverts across the web are bought and sold in real-time auctions, it was found that personal Information is widely used in the process without any consent (ICO, 2019).
People have accepted the sharing of PI with online companies in return for free access or use of sites or Apps. As the use and value of their personal information continues to grow, consumers are adapting their online habits, becoming more careful and increasingly wary of what, with whom and why they share it. Additionally, advances in the use of 5G + Augmented Reality, Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and Facial Recognition all stand to exacerbate the issue with the the EU already planning sweeping regulatory changes in response (ft.com, 2019)
Considering this increasingly data privacy conscious environment, there is an opportunity to create a mutually beneficial relationship between individuals and organisations by bringing benefits to both parties, underpinned by Blockchain and distributed storage technologies.
Cufflink will do this by developing a free, easy-to-use, safe and trustworthy App for individuals to store, access and (should they wish) share their Personal Information.
Organisations will likewise have access to a more secure, transparent and accurate way of managing PI via a complimentary SaaS (Software as a Service) application and framework, thus easing the associated risks, regulatory burden and, ultimately, saving money.
They will store only a reference to an Individual (rather than the raw PI) thus mitigating both data loss penalties and regulatory compliance costs in classifying, updating and cleansing their data.
By collaborating alongside world leading authorities on data privacy from Bangor University we aim to ensure and develop an ethically informed and privacy-centric application with the aim of providing Individuals with a clear choice, and indeed defined standard, as to how they will in future manage, share and control their personal information.
"The value and importance of personal information is clearer than ever as a result of recent high profile and well publicised data breaches combined with an ever greater scrutiny of the way internet giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon use and commercialise the personal information we entrust with them. But the services to help Individuals manage their own personal information remains very primitive with the lack of incentives having resulted in the centralisation, silo-ing and duplication of data.
The motivation for this project is to encourage Individuals to become more ""data aware"" whilst also
giving them somewhere to safely store and manage their own personal information. Cufflink aims to do this by providing a secure, structured and easy to use tool (in the form of a Mobile Application (App)) whilst also controlling the who, how and when any of the information stored can be accessed. We believe this will lead to user empowerment, more secure persona and personal data management, greater user participation & understanding and a user-led push for technology adoption and industry standardisation.
We believe there is an opportunity to create this secure, mutually beneficial relationship between Individuals and Organisations by highlighting the benefits to both parties of more accurate and timely user information without the burden of existing data storage, maintenance and regulatory constraints.
The Cufflink Service aims to improve the current state-of-the-art by developing an innovative, regulatory compliant, structured and encrypted personal information data store.
We will create an entirely new App and Distributed Ledger (DLT) integrated platform and the purpose of this feasibility study is to firstly, demonstrate a need and target market for the User application whilst secondly, assessing whether there is the appetite and enough of a financial incentive within organisations for combining and leveraging such a solution."