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Welcome to PersonalData.IO,

the integrative toolbox for addressing surveillance capitalism.

  What we do!

  Campaigns

We encourage individuals to exercise their data rights, particularly when we think collective exercise of those rights would be transformative. For this reason we launch more focused campaigns.

  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

  News

* 2019-05-24: Paul just attended a workshop at Sophia-Antipolis.

  Get involved

You can join us at the Project:Community Portal.

  About us

We are a small Geneva nonprofit focused on data protection. We want to empower an agile civil society to respond to threats associated with personal data. You can find more info about us here.

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.

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 data ecosystems, 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
Adtech ecosystem	routes your personal data takes when you browse the web	Personal_Data_viz
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	[4] [5] [6] [7]
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
MyDataLab Geneva	workshop run in the context of the OpenGeneva festival
Open Science Hardware	Mapping the Gathering for Open Science Hardware community
MyData ecosystem	MyData case bank
MyData Finland ecosystem	Finnish ecosystem	[8]
MyData Japan ecosystem	Japanese ecosystem	[9]

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

For more on visualisations, look here.