As a result of his research as an AI specialist into the value of data, Professor Hashida of the University of Tokyo has proposed and developed the Personal Life Repository (PLR), a tool to realize in concrete form the MyData principle, that the person to whom the information pertains guides how that information is used. PLR is a distributed personal data store (PDS) that satisfies the three requirements of low price, safety and versatility.
1. Low Price
Unlike general applications, PLR does not require dedicated servers. PLR is used on the PLR cloud, a cloud service domain where individuals can register and open accounts, basically for free. Currently PLR uses Google Drive, but plans call for support of other services as well, such as OneDrive, DropBox and iCloud.
2. Safety
In addition to end-to-end encryption, PLR features digital rights management (DRM), which enables the user to limit how the data is used. This feature distinguishes PLR from most information systems, which vest a central administrator with authority to access all manner of data on the system, leaving them vulnerable to misuse that can lead to massive data breaches. With PLR, data management is distributed to individual users and data is encrypted, so large-scale data leaks do not occur.
3. Versatility
Professor Hashida, the progenitor of PLR, incorporates data normalization into PLR as a basic specification, bearing in mind the expected use of the data by AI. This normalization enables many varieties of personal data to be shared by PLR.