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Welcome to PersonalData.IO,

the integrative toolbox for addressing surveillance capitalism.

Why PersonalData.IO?

We have all lost control over our personal data, yet we have no space where we can collectively reclaim it. We want to encourage collaborative dynamics between the general public and within civil society in all of its diversity (activists, researchers, educators, etc). These dynamics materialize around information about the personal data ecosystem, as well as cutting edge tools to respond to current practices and shape the future of the personal data economy.

When you use our tools, you can for instance:

• contribute to better visualisations of the entire ecosystem;
• improve our tooling, giving more power to individual users;
• share back the knowledge you gain from using those tools.

Who is behind this?

This project was founded by Paul-Olivier Dehaye and has one employee.

It is financed in part by:

• private donations;
• the Data Transparency Lab; and
• Open Society Foundations.

What do we do?

We act at two levels:

• top-down, offering visualisations of data ecosystems, and the tools to collectively improve them;
• bottom-up, offering tooling to act on these networks, anchored in individual legal rights.

We also aim as much as possible to integrate the two levels: individuals exercising their rights should be informed by the latest research on the data ecosystems, and should be able to contribute back their expertise.

We are always looking for new contributors!

Visualizations

These are some of the visualizations we are building together.

Data ecosystem	Topic	Visualization	Main item	Visualization method
Adtech ecosystem	routes your personal data takes when you browse the web	Where is my personal data going	Example
Elections	how political parties, social media services and voters connect through personal data
Facebook's tools	various Facebook tools, and how they exchange information	[1]
Facebook and disinformation	how disinformation blends into our information ecosystem through Facebook	[2]
Cambridge Analytica scandal	visual summary	[3]
Scottish data ecosystem	MyData Scotland ecosystem mapping workshop
Mobility data ecosystem	actors and activities in the mobility space
Platform economy and work	workers contribute a lot of data to the gig work ecosystem
Platform economy and work	workers contribute a lot of data to the gig work ecosystem
MyDataLab Geneva	workshop run in the context of the OpenGeneva festival
Open Science Hardware	Mapping the Gathering for Open Science Hardware community

Of course, it is necessary for these visualisations to engage in a mapping process. We explain here how to do so.

Individual data rights

Subject Access Requests are requests for access to your personal data. Usually you get data that you can contribute back to our maps! Here is a Youtube video explaining the process

Campaigns

To bridge the ecosystem (top-down) and individual (bottom-up) level, we build awareness campaigns.

Addiction

Investigate how digital services create addiction, through transparency on the data collection component of the addiction feedback loop.

• Digital services and addiction

Adtech

See Adtech campaign (Q397)

Feminism

This is not formal yet, but data protection could learn a lot from data protection.

Maintenance

Now moved to Maintenance