Microsoft would be working on a project designed to give users control over the data collected about them. The project is codenamed ‘Bali’, writes ZDNet. Project Bali comes from Microsoft Research and seems to be in private testing at the moment.
The existence of Bali was discovered by a tweet from Twitter user Longhorn. The user describes it as “a project that can remove all your connections and account information”. ZDNet then discovered a link to the Bali project page. People with a code can login to the website. Users without a code can request one.
On the website Bali is described as “a new personal database that gives users control over all data collected about them. The bank allows users to store all the data generated by them. It allows users to visualize, manage, manage, share, and monetize the data.”
Inverse Privacy
Bali is based on the concept of Inverse Privacy, which is the subject of a 2014 paper by Yuri Gurevich, Efim Hudis and Jeanette Wing. All those people were working for Microsoft Research at the time. Inverse Privacy works as follows: a piece of personal information is invoked privately if a party has access to it, but the creator/user does not. For example, the police, supermarkets and employers can create this type of data, and in many cases, according to the authors of the paper, users will benefit from managing the data.
According to the website of Project Bali the project is in a first phase. “That means that the developers focus on helping users to collect personal data from websites and have the opportunity to view the data.”
Microsoft has not yet responded to the project.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.