COULD we treat data as if it were money, private objects that can be deposited, exchanged, managed, and protected?This is the concept Steve Holcombe, CEO of Pardalis, put to me by e-mail after reading one of my articles on proposed EU legislation to limit the use of radio frequency identification technology (RFID).

"The EU research shows why data privacy matters, but still does not conceptualise 'data ownership', which is something more," Holcombe wrote to me back in March. "The institution of a private banking system set up for storing and processing granular information on behalf of account holders. That is the next evolutionary step that you should be now writing about."

Intrigued by the concept, though confused by the word 'granular', I wrote back asking for more. Holcombe asked me to wait until he presented the concept in a white paper before the Third Annual IFAS Conference on Nanotechnology in April.

Pardalis was started in 1994 to develop software for the inventorying and management of information on hazardous chemicals. It is now branching out further to the larger question of how to give people and companies the power to manage and control information. Hence the concept of private data banks.

"You have probably never seen or heard of a white paper published by a software company that claims to have developed methods for helping to solve a political issue," Holcombe begins. "Information ownership is a political issue, and it is becoming more so in a world of increasing RFID and nanotechnology usage."

Holcombe is addressing a topic dear to my heart and I believe crucial to the prevention of the steady encroachment on our right to privacy by government, individuals and private organisations.

Data ownership matters because "increased technological ownership placed in the hands of information producers, over and above legislated ownership, holds forth the promise of breaking up current and looming political controversies centering on information sharing and tracking," Holcombe believes.

He proposes to give people the choice to bank and use their information like they bank and use their money. Technology companies are adept at tracking products, our consumption of products, and even personal movements (eg through RFID) but the politics of doing so has in large part been left to them, he notes.

Private data banks would give empowerment back to the individual, where it rightly resides. In other words, the concept, if developed, would mark an amazing power shift back in the right direction.

The monetary banking system has many key characteristics that apply to private data. Security, credibility, compensation on deposits, customer control, convenience, integration and verification are the qualities that one would want in a private data bank, according to Holcombe.

To achieve the same qualities in a data bank, he comes up with the concept of "granular information ownership", which defines attributes of each piece of private information. Information producers, you or a company, would have the tools for authoring, maintaining and distributing each piece of data, defined as "Informational Objects" or "granular components".

"Informational Objects would be the information products authored by information producers along commercial or consumption supply chains like those for health care, food and energy consumption," he suggests.

Information objects could also be a social security number, a person's birth date, a picture of a livestock brand, an animal's genetic marker, or a single transaction of a gasoline purchase.

Each stands alone as a single informational object controlled by the producer.

"Residing on the internet, a granular information banking system would provide information producers with a centralised "dictionary" of uniquely-identified, immutable data elements, which could be packaged into informational objects.

Producers could then distribute the information as they like to retail stores, government regulators, supply chain participants, insurance companies and physicians once they grant permission.

"Granular Informational Object deposit holders" would then recognise the ownership of data similar to the banking of their money, he concludes. They could even sell on or license these rights, if they chose to do so.

"There is a quagmire at the intersection of the competing needs for global information transparency and confidential information ownership," says Holcombe. "Granular information ownership matters because it holds forth the promise of empowering people with much more technological and political control of their information than that provided by conventional information technologies and legislated confidentiality protections."

This would be an improvement on the current system of data handling and protection, which we know continues to fail spectacularly, when data is lost or stolen. Currently the whole issue is governed by law, requiring online companies to disclose how they handle people's information.

But the current system gives little direct, on-demand control over data is provided to the actual owners of the information, he notes.

Pardalis is now developing what it calls Common Point Authoring (CPA), the software architecture that will run these data banks. It has already created one for the agriculture and food sector as an example of how it works.

The CPA system uniquely identifies every authored data element, makes it unchangeable, and attributes the "author" to each piece.

Is this the way forward for data management and privacy? Whether this concept or another captures those values outlined by Holcombe for data banks, the creation of such a system will be a giant step forward from the present situation.

Check out his company's development of the concept and the technology at www.pardalis.com.

If you have any comments please contact elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.