Personal, Inc.

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Personal, Inc.
Private
Industry Internet
Founded 2009
Headquarters Washington, D.C., US
Website www.personal.com

Personal (also referred to as Personal.com or Personal, Inc.) is a cloud-based Personal Data Service and identity management system for individuals to aggregate, manage and reuse their own data.

Personal consumer products include: the Fill It App for automated completion of web and mobile forms, logins and checkouts; the Data Vault with Cloud Sync for secure 02 2673 5586management and sharing of data and documents between02 2673 5586an individual and other individuals, companies, sites, apps and devices; and Data Imports to import information from third parties, including social media services, companies and the U.S. Department of Education.

The Personal platform supports user-centric data management and portability for over 1,200 different types (or fields) of structured, machine-readable, human-readable data. The platform also provides tools and APIs for developers and companies to integrate Fill It and the Data Vault into their websites and applications, primarily to give data back to their customers so they can autofill web and mobile forms.

Personal offers a free trial and a subscription service for individuals and has a SaaS-like model for companies to use the service.[1]

History

Personal was founded in 2009 in Washington, DC by the management team that built The Map Network, which was acquired by Nokia/NAVTEQ in 2006.[2] Founded in 1999, The Map Network (previously called URHere.com) built the first platform for places and events to create and distribute digital online and mobile maps, data and content. The Map Network served as the official mapping solution for over 100 cities and thousands of events and venues, from the NFL Super Bowl to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to the Smithsonian Institution. It also produced the most-used interactive map of 9/11 relief and rescue efforts.[2][3][4]

Called a “life management platform” by The Economist[5] and a “personal encrypted cloud service” by TIME for its user-centric approach to data,[1] the company has been associated with both the Infomediary model originated in 1999 by John Hagel III and Mark Singer, as well as the vendor relationship management (VRM) model developed by Doc Searls. Personal closed $7.6m in funding in December 2010, including Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, Grotech Ventures, Allen & Company, Ted Leonsis, Neil Ashe and Jonathan Miller.[6]

Personal was early to embrace “small data,” which it defines as “big data for the benefit of individuals.”[7] The term “small data” may have been originally coined by Jeremie Miller of Sing.ly, who mentioned it in a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in November 2011 and is cited in The Intention Economy.[8] In 2011, Personal was a part of the first group of companies to join the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium's Startup Circle.[9] A Small Data Meetup group has also formed in New York City, bringing together technology, legal and business experts to exchange ideas about user-centric and user-driven models for internet products and services.[10] Since 2010, it has raised $12.5 million from the same and new investors, including $4.5m from Bill Miller of Legg Mason and Esther Dyson of EDventures in October 2013.[11]

Products and services

Overview

The Personal Platform is a privacy- and security-by-design platform for individuals to manage and reuse their own data and information. The Fill It app is a 1-click form-filling solution for web and mobile logins, checkouts and forms, and the Data Vault app serves as the main cloud-based repository for a user's data. Personal helps individuals take control and benefit from their information while knowing that the information in their Data Vault remains legally theirs and cannot be used without their permission.

Data Vault with Cloud Sync

Personal spent two years building the Personal Platform before launching its Data Vault product in beta in November 2011. Following Privacy by Design principles, Personal only enables users to see or share the sensitive data and all the files they store in their Data Vault. Such information is encrypted, and can only be decrypted with a user’s password. Only users choose and know their passwords to their vault because Personal does not store user passwords – and therefore cannot reset them without deleting a user’s sensitive data and all files stored in their vault.[12] All Personal apps and services are linked to a user’s private Data Vault.

The Data Vault features automatic synchronization of data and files added on any device logged into Personal. It also features a “Secure Share” function that creates a live, private network, allowing registered users to share access to data and files through an exchange of encrypted keys without the risk of transmitting the data or files through non-secure, direct means. It also allows users to immediately update data across their own network and revoke access to it when they choose.

Personal launched its Android app on November 30, 2011.[13][14] The iOS Data Vault app was released on May 7, 2012.[15] Personal officially launched its application programming interface (APIs) on October 2, 2012 at the Mashery Business of APIs Conference.[16] A review by CNET highlighted the challenges of getting people to trust such a new service with their sensitive data and spending the time required entering enough data to make it useful.[17]

Fill It App and Form Index

When the Data Vault was launched in November 2011, Mashable posed the question: “Never Fill Out a Form Again?”[13] The World Economic Forum in its February 2013 report highlighted the possibility of saving 10 billion hours globally “and improv[ing] the delivery of public and private sector services” through automated form-filling tools, specifically citing Personal’s Fill It app.[18] In January 2013, Personal launched Fill It in beta as a web bookmarklet for automatic form-filling.[19]

On June 11, 2014, Personal released Fill It as a web extension and announced that it was publishing an index of over 140,000 1-click online forms at www.fillit.com.[20] The company also announced that a mobile version of the product will launch later in the year. According to a story in Tech Cocktail about the launch, Personal’s “web extension and mobile app are able to support over 1,200 different types of reusable data, even enabling them to unlock more confidential information so they can complete longer forms, including patient registrations, job applications, event registrations, school admissions, insurance and bank applications, and government forms.”[20]

Personal’s form portal, which now contains more than 225,000 forms, comprises three components, which, together, allow data to be captured and reused across any of the forms: (1) a form graph, which maps individual form fields to the Personal ontology; (2) a semantic layer, which determines how data is required on a form (e.g. one field vs. three fields for a U.S. telephone number); and (3) a correlations graph, which helps individuals match their specific data to a form without looking at the data value (e.g. knowing which phone number is a mobile phone number, which address is a billing address, or that a person uses their middle name as a first name on most forms).[21]

Monetizing personal data

With the initial public offering of Facebook in May 2012, there was media interest in the question of the monetary value of personal data and whether tools and services might emerge to help consumers monetize their own data. Personal has been frequently cited as a company to potentially offer such a service. Articles and pieces focusing on this subject have appeared in The New York Times, AdWeek, the MIT Technology Review, and on CNN and National Public Radio.[22][23][24] Company Co-founder and CEO Shane Green was quoted as saying that “the average American consumer would soon be able to realize over $1,000 per year” by granting limited, anonymous access to their data to marketers, but that figure was never supported by Green or the company.[25]

Reception

Personal was the first online consumer-facing company to be named an Ambassador for Privacy by Design for its technical, business and legal commitments to providing users with control over the data they store in Personal’s service.[26][27][28][29] The company has received recognition for its user agreement, called the Owner Data Agreement,[30] which acts like a reverse license agreement when data is shared between registered parties and emphasizes that data ownership resides with the user. Doc Searls wrote in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge that the Owner Data Agreement “had no precedent and modeled a new legal position, both for vendors and for intermediaries.”[31] Fast Company called the Data Vault “a tool that will simplify our lives.”[32] Personal has been included in case studies by Ctrl-Shift and Forrester regarding Personal Data Stores and Personal Identity Management.[33][34]

In 2011, Personal received the Innovator Spotlight Award at Privacy Identity Innovation Conference (pii2011) and participated in the Technology Showcase at pii2012.[35][36] In 2012, TechHive named Personal as one of the top five apps or web services of SXSW.[37] Personal won the 2013 Campus Technology Innovators Award with Lone Star College in July 2013.[38] Personal was included in a list of Executive Travel Magazine's favorite travel apps for 2013 in its May/June issue.[39] In 2013, Personal was also included as part of NYU GovLab's Open Data 500 and was named by J. Walter Thompson as one of 100 things to watch for in 2014.[40][41]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ http://www.meetup.com/smalldata/
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  38. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  39. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  40. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  41. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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