MyData 2017 – Empowering Individuals With Their Personal Data

MyData 2017 – Empowering Individuals With Their Personal Data

Over 800 business representatives, government officials, academics, and civil society members will gather in Tallinn and Helsinki from August 30th to September 1st, to work on rebuilding the domain of personal data to be human-centric. The aim of the conference is to strengthen the developing MyData Global Network. At the conference, the Declaration of MyData principles will be published and signed by individuals as well as pioneering organisations.


‘Human-centric personal data’ means empowering people with their personal data; enabling us to be in control of our digital footprint and use our data for our own purposes instead of being mere data objects. ”It’s data about me, and I should be able to decide who uses the data and for what purposes”, explains Antti ‘Jogi’ Poikola, a conference organiser from Aalto University.

This vision is shared widely around the globe, not just in Finland and Estonia. This body of people and organizations – the MyData Global Network – has existed for a couple of years. “The MyData global community has made a decisive step forward by formulating the Declaration of MyData Principles that summarizes the values that the global community holds high and applies in their work.” The declaration will be published and publicly signed by individuals and companies in the conference. “In a way it’s a checklist of being human-centric at your core processes as an organization”, Mällo describes.

Human-centric principles are also relevant now when it’s less than an year to the enactment of EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The new regulation will affect on all organisations that handle personal data of customers and users. Questions like ‘What are the possibilities and challenges of this new legislative space?’ and ‘What will come of the personal data economy?’ will be discussed in the MyData 2017 conference.

“We can do amazing things as humans, but no one can do them alone”, says Poikola, to which Mällo continues: “It’s great to now also see government agencies in several countries incorporating MyData in their agendas”.

MyData 2017 brings together the remarkable international community of people who care and act upon human-centric principles of personal data management. MyData 2017 programme is divided into 12 thematic tracks among which there are for example Ethics, GDPR, Health, and Consent. These tracks are created and curated by the members of the network. Presenters vary from business leaders such as Julian Ranger from Digi.me, legal professionals like Tobias Bräutigam, privacy advocates like Aurélie Pols, technology developers like Markus Sabadello, to data and AI ethics activists like Katryna Dow.

MyData 2017 conference is jointly organised by Aalto University, Tallinn University, Open Knowledge Finland, and the French foresight research organization Fing. The main partner of the conference is Suomi.fi services.

MyData conference is held for the second time. In 2016, 670 MyData pioneers gathered in Kultuuritalo in Helsinki. The presentations from MyData 2016 are available on YouTube.

Programme and all presenters of MyData 2017 http://www.mydata2017.org
/programme

For more information and accreditation (before 27.8.) http://www.mydata2017.org/press

Salla Thure
salla@mydata.org
+358440335620