The Role of Personal Data Accounts and Sustainability

‍Enabling Use cases in Sustainability

Dataswift’s cloud-hosted, decentralized Personal Data Accounts enable individuals to own and control their personal data. This system enables multiple, unrelated applications to coordinate across thousands and millions of individuals without depending on centralized platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to galvanize actions. Personal data accounts aid in the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Examples include:

Smart Meters: Smart meters connected to a Personal Data Account (PDA) collect personal data on the resource usage of individuals within the home. This means individuals can gather insights from their data and transact their data with any applications to optimize for electricity consumption and coordination between households. 

Using PDA collected smart meter data, organizations can also use this information to create new energy trading markets. Dataswift is a delivery partner on the ERDF funded Eastern New Energy project and is committed to advancing decarbonization and sustainability innovation in Eastern England through the use of personal data accounts. This three-year project will involve collaborating with local businesses, NGOs, and technology companies to understand new uses for connected devices and energy data.

Air quality markets: Currently under investigation by our academic partners, the ‘7 Litres’ project utilizes PDAs and personal air quality sensors to collect and analyze the air environment encountered by researchers as they go about their day. This research will focus on the business models required to make local businesses stakeholders in their breathable air market.

Coordination of environmental resources: Personal data accounts enable the coordination across multiple applications through data sharing to coordinate the consumption of resources and reduce wastage.

Eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. Personal Data Accounts are currently issued in Brazil for providing alternative risk scores to enable hundreds of Brazilians to access credit and microloans.

Personal data as an asset. Using Personal Data Accounts encourages individuals to control the transaction of their data with all services, enabling a better market to function. Personal data becomes a recognized asset, accrued & transacted by its rightful owners in the same way as other private assets. 

Most importantly, this asset now resides in the jurisdiction and locale of a citizen, removing legal ambiguity about data governance and returning economic values yielded through personal data.