[Written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]
Matt Ambrose posts this week about Red Hot Openers that Get Readers Eager for More. So here goes...
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.
How am I doing so far Matt? :-)
Seriously, SWIFT matters to you this week. This member owned co-operative is actually at the cutting edge of dealing with your 21st Century currency – your data. And as I posted a month ago, data is this decade's number one revolution.
If you accept that your data is your reputation (credit scoring is over 40 years old), and that your data has value to those who want to understand and serve your needs, then it's a bit of a shocker that in 2012 you don't have much control over it.
Actually, I have a bit more control over mine than you do, but only because I'm wielding some fairly blunt instruments. I don't go anywhere near Facebook (been clean for two and a half years – check this out). I use Firefox, with Do Not Track enabled and some tight cookie controls. And make good use of Google's Data Liberation Front.
But that's it. No fine granular control. And no control over the majority of data I kick off from my mobile, from purchases, from interactions of almost any sort with organisations.
Regular readers might recall a Roundup from November last year describing the UK's leadership in this sector with the launch of midata, supported by twenty six major organisations. Now SWIFT is determined to give you control over your currency with the unveiling this week of a prototype of the Digital Asset Grid, "a platform for secure, authorised peer to peer data sharing between known, trusted people, businesses and devices". Information Age has a good write-up.
Such facility is known by various names including personal data vault, personal data locker, and fourth party. I call it a Streams Bank because you bank your data streams just like you bank money, and data streams includes sources we haven't traditionally considered personal data. The question is, do we think the banks – or even a co-operative society of them – are really going to lead this revolution? Have they the reputation we're looking for to help us maintain our own?
