In 1947, following the Partition of British India, my grandparents found themselves on the “wrong” side of the newly defined border between India and Pakistan. While my grandfather stayed back in our ancestral village to keep hold of the house and lands in Taib, my grandmother fled with their five children to find safety in Pune, India.
She was extraordinarily fortunate to have the means to sail from Karachi to Bombay, before catching a train to Pune. With her, she carried as much gold jewelry as she could to provide for herself and her family, and – critically – her most important personal documents.
As the banks soon disallowed money transfers across the border, this was all she had to restart life with her five children in an unfamiliar city – without her husband. During the 1940s, my grandmother’s perceived value in society was largely dependent on her status – as an educated woman, and most importantly, as a wife. Without her marriage certificate and matriculation documents from her boarding school in Punjab, she could have struggled immensely to integrate into her new community. Being able to prove these facts about her identity ultimately enabled her to rent out a flat, enroll her kids in school, and take the first steps towards a new life.
The ability to share personal data can connect us to services, society, and others - even for those in the most difficult of situations.
Today, for displaced people globally facing a similar situation, having these assets more readily available can provide tangible, even lifesaving, benefits. In Ukraine, millions of people have been displaced by the Russian invasion, the majority being women and children. For these families, the government’s online Diia platform has been an important driver of resilience. This online app has provided a means of accessing critical identity information, like passports, proof of education, and more, allowing people to more easily cross borders with their digital passports, access medical records for ongoing health needs, and secure lodging. And, just as importantly, this platform has allowed the Ukrainian diaspora to maintain a sense of connection – despite being dispersed across the world.
Access to personal credentials – for both my grandmother in the 1940s and countless Ukrainian families today – is an invaluable tool. With digitalization, these assets are becoming even more vital, thanks to their ability to prove key facts about us, verify our identities, and enable us to interact with the world.
While these examples highlight the benefits of personal data for people in need, it can also be a powerful driver of opportunity and growth.
Digitizing these personal credentials can empower people across the world – allowing them to leverage their most personal information for greater quality of life and wellbeing. Having access to this vital information can benefit people in countless ways – allowing them to have their medical records reviewed by a greater range of doctors, boosting credit scores through access to alternative data, or helping people track and optimize positive habits like exercise and healthy eating. In the information economy, these assets can also open up incredible new opportunities. Access to digital credentials can help people do things like apply for a loan to open a small business, providing them the means of paying for their children’s educations, investing in their livelihoods, and saving for the future. Especially for those living in lower income communities, these benefits can be transformative.
And for institutions that prioritize digital credentials and effective data policies, these tools can promote greater ease and efficiency. Hiring agencies can seamlessly verify a job seeker’s education credentials rather than worrying about fake certificates, while healthcare providers can deliver services more quickly, thanks to the ability to access patients’ medical history.
With such enormous power, what is needed to ensure people can understand and manage their data?
While personal data offers incredible potential, at the same time, digitizing one’s credentials also makes it easy to overshare, and personal data can end up in the wrong hands. This can expose people to fraud, privacy invasion, or even identity theft.
To protect against these risks, mechanisms are needed to help people better understand, track, and control how their data is being used. The financial sector can provide a helpful model, as innovators have devised means of ensuring people are empowered to manage their money in alignment with their goals. Some of these innovations include:
- Creating friction: Today, many banking institutions provide notifications to customers for a variety of reasons, like low balance, larger than normal purchases, and unusual account activity. This allows users to identify potentially fraudulent activity.
- Creating habits: Automated deposits encourage good savings behavior, allowing people to put aside designated amounts of money each month.
- Creating goals: By allowing users to create and name “pockets” of money – for a downpayment on a house perhaps – financial service providers enable people to more easily set, measure, and work toward their long-term savings goals.
- Creating visibility & understanding: By providing reports on spending patterns and trends, financial institutions are helping people better understand – and adapt – their own money management practices.
Like money, personal data is also a powerful currency, and many of these same tactics can be applied to data assets just as they can monetary ones.
- Creating friction: For data users, similar types of notifications could allow individuals to better understand when a request to access their information could be considered suspicious or intrusive.
- Creating goals: Like automated savings behavior, goal-setting mechanisms could be implemented to allow users to determine when – and who – is allowed to access their data. This could include regulating medical records to only be accessible by hospitals, pharmacies, or other healthcare organizations.
- Creating visibility and understanding: Fostering greater visibility and transparency around data access and usage could help people more easily track when their data had been used through consent logs and notifications of anomalous use, for example.
Together, these mechanisms can advance a future where people across the world are able to more easily take control over their personal data – and use it to reap important benefits. When giving people access to their data digitally, let’s learn the lessons that sectors like finance can offer, allowing us to mitigate risks – and maximize the value – of important digital assets.
