Digital me: Controlling and making sense of my digital footprint

Abstract

Our lives are getting increasingly digital; much of our personal interactions are digitally mediated. A side effect of this is a growing digital footprint, as every action is logged and stored. This data can be very powerful, e.g., a person’s actions can be predicted, and deeply personal information mined. Hence, the question of who controls the digital footprint is becoming a pressing technological and social issue. We believe that the solution lies in human-centric personal data, i.e., the individuals themselves should control their own data. We claim that in order for human-centric data management to work, the individual must be supported in understanding their data. This paper introduces a personal data storage system Digital Me (DiMe). We describe the design and implementation of DiMe, and how we use state-of-the-art machine learning for visualisation and interactive modelling of the personal data. We outline several applications that can be built on top of DiMe.