A Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure for my Personal Data

The UK has seen a couple of odd cases of "data loss" lately. Government organisations have on at least 4 occasions lost data about UK citizens: names, birth dates, addresses, bank account details and even some hospital records. Some data was lost by subcontractors and one of those subcontractors was even in the US!

Things like this have not happened in other countries, yet, or maybe they were not made public. But they make me wonder: can I trust my country or my government know what they do with the data they collect from me?

As Jan Schallaböck of the German ULD suggested in a talk at 23C3: DRM might be the solution.

If whenever I hand personal data over to anybody, I could at the same time specify who should be able to use that data, and for how long, I would not be affected by data losses at all.

Of course, it is not that simple.

For this to work, there has to be some standard for "DRM-protected personal data". The different government branches who need my data would have to use software that can handle this standard format-to-be. And I would need some software on my end that would enable me to apply DRM to my data before I send it off.

Maybe it's another "egg or hen" situation as no government will buy software as long as nobody sends them DRM-protected data. And as long as they cannot read it, I am forced to send my data in plain format.

I would love to have a tool that enables me to send my data off with DRM enabled. I guess I would need to parts: one tool that does the "signing" of my content, and a second one that acts as a server and "watches" how my data is used, or enables some people or organisms to actually use the data. The latter one would also render the data unreadable whenever I want.

Of all the software I won't write, this is by far the most important. If anyone knows of a project - preferrably open source - then let me know! I'd absolutely participate.

A "Social Search Engine"

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.

Foto Timer or Meditation Timer for Windows Mobile

I really should port Foto Timer or Meditation Timer to Windows Mobile (or Pocket PC, or whatever the name is, currently) for two reasons: first of all, Palm OS seems to be "on the way out". Secondly, lot's of smartphones use Windows Mobile.

I simply do not have the time to rewrite Foto Timer and Meditation Timer, currently. And I only have an old Compaq iPac to test it on, not the most sexy device ever...

On the other hand, of all the software I will never write, this is the most probably to materialize some day :-)