Your data, finally for you!

Your personal data is becoming more useful to you #

I came to an epiphany recently, that your personal data is becoming a lot more valuable to you in the AI era, i.e. if you know how to leverage it. Hear me out.#

It’s a bit of a cliche that users’ personal data is valuable. It is the most valuable thing in the Big Tech era, in the sense those big corporations leverage them to make their advertising platform more efficient and make a lot of money (case for Google and Meta). They leverage them to make their products more sticky, mildly addictive, like a drug (all the social media companies). Last but not least, they enable them to create a new generation of models, the recent AI (LLM) wave being a prominent manifestation. While the data to train LLM is often not private, they are created by humans, and conceptually owned by those humans, thus “personal”.#

However, in those cases, your data is used in aggregates. They are valuable to those who are in the position to gather a lot of them in a single place, aka Big Tech. In practice, that same data is far less useful to you as an individual — at least not in any way that benefits you. Can you still remember the annoying GDPR cookie prompt that you have to click? People only worry about their data in the fear of catastrophic leaks that negatively affect them, not in how they can use their own data well. I think one key reason had been that there hadn’t been easy technologies and products to help you make use of all the data you have. We lived in an era of amnesia of our own personal data.#

This is changing rapidly in the AI era. The ability of new generation of AI tools to read unstructured textual and increasingly image data, reason about them, and derive new insights, generating new things, fundamentally changed our relationship to our own data. I think there are a lot that can be done to give everyone the tools to make sense of their own data, and thus their own lives.#

How? Roughly I think we need the following:#

put data in a single place that the user has full control.
have tools to help construct a mental model of the backbone of the data you have.
and become AI literate and leverage AI on such personal archive.

Keep it yours #

Historically speaking, people’s data is scattered in many different services and devices. The irony is while we have plenty of services to organize the world’s information; there’s a scarcity of products that you can use to organize all your information. The first step of making your data useful to you, is to have it first in a single place that really belongs to you, not some big corporations.#

And with all your information in a single place, the need to keep it secure and private should be built from day one.#

Keep it legible #

Data needs to be organized to be useful. When it comes to personal data, getting organized means to help the user form a coherent mental model of what data they have, and help them organize, distill, synthesize, enrich their data. In practice: you dump information in freeform, the AI keeps it organized and cross-linked, and you only hold the index in your head — a rough sense of what’s in there. The structure stays under your guidance, evolving as your understanding does.#

Leverage AI to do both #

Part of the reason why only Big Tech is leveraging the power of your personal data for their benefit, is that organizing and improving your data is a complex endeavor and costs a lot of money. With the advances in AI, the traditional software cost model is breaking down. Now, it’s very possible for any reasonably technical person to have the power of a full development team at their disposal. ariadne, nous, pair, and parley.nvim are living examples — all built with the same workflow. The work is shifting from highly trained professionals to people who are AI-literate and able to leverage tools to their advantage.#

What’s to come #

Combine those three, you have an extended brain, an instrument you drive — one you can use to organize, connect, and pressure-test your own thinking, working with you to further your understanding of your life, or any topics you care about.#

I’ve been tinkering about this in the last couple months. I have a rough setup now that I use daily, it’s the extension of my brain. Heck, I even named the base nous (a Greek word for mind/intellect), and my private data repo brain! For example, the other day I used this stack to understand who to vote for, resulting in you-decide, which helped me in Tuesday’s primary. you-decide, created in a couple of days, combines a public candidate dossier researcher with various safeguards, a private scoring scheme per office (some offices are political while others are more technical) and a private political philosophy, to make voting recommendations for me, really demonstrating the power of the extended brain.#

Stay tuned, more to come. This is the first in a series to show you what I have built.#