The goal of Project MySelf is to build a system to collect data about yourself in a safe and private way, so that you control your data and you can decide what happens with it.
You track a lot of data about yourself.
Some of that you do consciously. You might wear a wristband or a watch logging your daily activity or the miles you do when you do sports. You might use your phone to track your location, the food you eat, or the money you spend. You might record health data such as your weight, blood pressure, pulse. You might keep memories by writing a diary or taking photos.
Other data is tracked by your environment or by others. Your bank tracks how much money you spend, your house tracks how much energy you consume, your navigation system tracks, where you are going.
There are many other examples. Technology has made it tremendously easy to acquire and collect data. With your phone you have a powerful computer in your pocket, packed with sensors. More and more devices are connected to the Internet. Scales are sending weight data to the cloud. Phones are recording the path of your latest run or bike ride. A sensor to record your movements fits into a nice piece of jewelry. The Internet of Things is promising that there will be much more of that in the future, and with devices like the Rasperry Pi you are even able to easily build parts of it yourself. Cloud servives are queuing up to get your data and while helping you to make use of it build a business on top of it.
Tracking data about yourself can be very useful. You can use it to improve your health, gain insight into your life, control your behavior, remember good moments. You can learn and decide based on data which provide facts. This can make better decisions, get better understanding, and help you to do the right things. So there is value in tracking your data, and services which help you to make use of the data provide some of this value.
There is a problem, though. It's data about yourself. This by definition is very private data. You want it to be safe, you want to make sure that it's not abused. It's valuable data, and it would be great, if you profit from it at least as much as some cloud provider making use of your data. There are privacy laws, terms of use, ethics, organizations and individuals addressing these issues. It still needs care, and you better use the technical means which are available to stay in control of your own data.
But there is an even bigger problem. Combining data multiplies its value. You can answer the really interesting questions. Does my diet work? How much money do I spend, when I'm on vacation? What indicators predict my health? How does my environment influence my happiness? There are many more questions where data about yourself can give some answer, and the answers are even more sensitive and private than any of the individual data sets. If you want to make use of this you want to make sure that you know exactly what happens there. How can you be sure?
We need to solve this problem. I should be in control of data about myself. I should be able to decide what data I share, and if I do it at all. I should be the person who gains the insight in what can be learned from combining all the data I track about myself. I should own my data and be sure of it.
Project MySelf is the attempt to solve this problem. Its goal is to create a system which makes it possible to collect data about yourself in a safe and private way, so that you control your data and you can decide what happens with it.
Data is acquired on many different devices. A server in the cloud is the convenient way to collect it. To ensure privacy the data will be encrypted on the client, and the server won't have the keys required to decrypt it. This way you can use cloud servers without having to trust them to not to look into the data. Using assymetric encryption clients writing data only need to know the public key used for encryption, and only clients which read the data need to have the private key required for decryption of data.
The type of data which is in scope of this project is self-tracking data. This is data about yourself, which is recorded over time. It typically is a small amount of data acquired in regular intervals or on demand triggered by some activity. The most interesting use of the data usually is tracking it over time and correlating it with data from different sources or covering different aspects of your activity.
Primary deliverable of Project MySelf is the definition of an API for clients to talk to the server, to send and synchronize data. The API includes the format of the containers of the data, the definition how to encrypt the data, and some conventions for the actual data payload. The goal of the API is to allow having alternative server implementation, and a multitude of clients.
Another important deliverable of Project MySelf are reference implementations of the server and a client, and a test suite to validate conformance of server implementations to the API specification. The server should be easy to deploy. It is used by multiple clients, but only by a single user, so it does not have high scaling requirements.
There will be several different clients:
- Simple clients just sending data to server. They will run on special devices depending on the kind of data they track.
- Clients to show tracked data. These will read from the server and display results to the user. This is an area for many interesting solutions, covering different types of data, analyze and correlation of data, and sophisticated ways of visualisation.
- Clients to administrate the server. This could be a web interface running on the server itself or a special client using the API remotely.
- Importers to get data from an existing service and import it into the safe and private storage of Project MySelf
- Exporters to share selected data with others or to store it as backup.
- Hybrid clients combining several or all of the areas above.
The goal for the first step is to collect one specific type of data on multiple devices, store it safely on the server, and have a client to plot the data over time, per device or combined.
Project MySelf consists of a number of key elements. Each is a component living in its own git repository.
The first element is the API specification. This will be hosted in the main repository along with any general documentation or other central material and code.
The second element is the reference implementation of the server. Its name will be Mycroft. The code is in the mycroft repository.
The third element is the reference client. It will be a command line client operating on the API and will include some simple data acquisition features. Its name will be Myer. The code is in the myer repository.
The fourth element is a graphical client for display of data. This client will have access to all the data and will be the primary place for visualization and analysis of data. It will be called Myles. The code is in the myles repository.
The fifth element is a client for mobile devices. It will acquire data from sensors on a phone and allow users to manually put in specific data. This client will be called Myla.
Maybe we will need a separate client for administration of the server. This would have the name Mychael then.
- The user owns and controls the data.
- Data is encrypted before it is transmitted and stored on the server, so that there is no need to trust the server.
- The client is assumed to be a trusted environment, where it is safe to store secrets. The degree of trust necessary there is gradual and over time we might introduce ways to also operate in a less trusted client environment.
- Data can reliably and quickly be synchronized between clients
- The API is the central specification. Alternative implementations of server and client and integration with other services is desired and welcome.
- The project is developed as free software in an iterative way.
There is some work ahead to make this project reality. Tasks are tracked on Trello.
I spent my time during SUSE Hack Week 11 on making the first steps of the implementation. I got a running server, a running client, and implemented the first version of plotting data.
Hack Week 12 is just around the corner, and I plan to get more work done on this project.
If you would like to join me or contribute in any way, you are more than welcome.
Project MySelf is started and maintained by Cornelius Schumacher. If you want to join in, have questions, or want to discuss the project, please don't hesitate to contact me.