Microsoft's Bali Data Bank to Help Users Manage Their Data

Microsoft Research is currently working on an incubation project named Bali which is supposed to allow Microsoft users to control what happens with the data Redmond collects about them, as discovered by ZDNet.

Bali is built on the concept of "Inverse Privacy" presented in a research paper published by Yuri Gurevich, Efim Hudis, and Jeannette Wing in 2014, and described as follows in the abstract:

We say that an item of your personal information is private if you have it but nobody else does. It is inversely private if somebody has it but you do not. We analyze the provenance of inverse privacy and argue that technology and appropriate public policy can reduce inverse privacy to a minimum.

Bali will also allow users to "monetize" their data

As described on Bali's About page, the project which at the moment is in private beta is a personal data bank which allows users to be in control of all the data collected by the Microsoft products they employ on a daily basis.

Moreover, after logging in to the Bali data bank, one will be able to "visualize, manage, control, share and monetize" all their data amassed by Redmond on its servers.

Even though the project has all the signs of a handy tool for privacy-concerned Microsoft users, out of the five terms describing the actions users will be able to perform while logged in to the Bali platform, the monetizing part doesn't look that helpful in this context.

Invitation code required for testing

Bali's About page also says that the personal data bank platform will satisfy the following characteristics:

• It can be associated with a physical user through a verified identity
• It is secure and trustworthy
• It provides complete transparency into a user’s data
• It ensures that a user’s data is not used without permission
• It ensures that a user’s data is not misused

At the moment Bali is in its initial stage and is "focused on helping the user aggregate personal data from various websites and have an ability to view the data."

Because the project is still in private beta, it will require an invitation code for registering a new account.

Furthermore, although a code request page is linked on Bali's homepage, clicking on that link will throw an HTTP 404 error.