This post was originally published under the same title on the Personal blog, A Personal Stand.
We frequently get questions about our efforts to empower individuals with data – and how to work responsibly with companies and governments to help catalyze that model. They run the gamut from the technical- and product-oriented to business, marketing, policy and legal.
While some are specific to Personal, most apply to any permission-based, user-centric, “small-data” app or company – which are starting to spring up around the globe as an alternative, sustainable way to power data-driven personalization and services (i.e., just about everything that is connected these days).
So we decided to launch Personal University to share what we’ve learned, show what we’ve built, and tell the world about what our users and partners do with Personal today.
First and foremost, we are a technology and product company. That means our best thinking is reflected in the platform, apps and code we’ve developed over the last few years.
We won’t ignore the big societal questions along the way, but we think we’ll make a greater contribution by focusing on the actual tools, infrastructure and commercial value propositions we think are necessary — and that we’ve made available through Personal — to make this model a reality.
In that spirit, we’re inaugurating Personal University with a video on the Personal Platform. Unlike most companies, we couldn’t start building apps or services for people to use without a radically new technical foundation designed around the absolute domain of the individual over the personal data and files they manage in our service – and the security and privacy of that data.
Shane Green 