Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers.

It seems that the company itself alerted the Information Commissioner once they discovered this. Christopher Graham, who has been recently appointed as the IC, has called for prison sentences for those trading such data.

I am keen to go much further and close down the entire unlawful industry in personal data.

Sounds good, provided the definition of unlawful is customer friendly.

This is the other side of the bad coin of personal data – which is itself imprisoned in various silos and platforms. There are quite a few online that have more than ‘custodial’ overtones – Models of Data Imprisonment.

Last night’s VRM Hub was full house, with two visitors from out of town – the VRM Godfather Doc Searls and Mathias Baert from Belgium – half a dozen new people and great conversations in a pub afterwards. At the main session we talked about a new project called MINT:

MINT initiative was set up to ‘liberate customer data’* from company systems and organisational silos. We assist organisations that directly interact with customers or users, and retain data about transactions, to make purchase history data available to download at no charge, in open formats and fit for further use. The targeted organisations include, but are not limited to, retailers, utililties, telecommunications, public sector etc.

MINT recommends the following formats for customer’s purchase history data export: CSV, XML or JSON, Atom. We advise and provide technical implementation to those organisations that require it. Where there is human readable data, it ought to be machine readable for futher analysis and added value. Where there is machine readable data, it ought to be human readable for comprehension and accessibility.

MINT stands for ‘My Information, Not Theirs’ and is a market RIOT initiative, a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users. MINT is based in the UK but will work with organisations located anywhere, whenever practically possible.

The MINT initiative is open to anyone wishing to have their data liberated from closed platforms and silos and falls into one of the following categories:

• somebody in a position to tweak their organisations database to provide downloadable transaction/purchase history to their customers or users OR anyone who think they might know someone.
• a data-geek with understanding of open formats and/or database data exports.
• a developer interested in providing users with analytical functionality and ability to mine their own data

The next VRM Hub will be on Thursday October 29, speaker to be announced and sign-up page published shortly.

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*Note: Alas, the Data Liberation Front had already been taken at the time of the MINT idea but not until very recently it has also sprung to action. Excellent news and hope this will be a decent snowball. I suppose we could always be the People’s Front for Data Liberation…