Are Personal Data Stores Next?

Was pointed to this article.   Even the term itself was new to me.    Nice exploratory piece below, I agree this has to be kept very simple, with clear goals, benefits and security. Like they say, most everything there is immature and I wold not put my own data in an uncertain space.

Are Personal Data Stores about to become the NEXT BIG THING?  In Medium  Written by Irina and Simon Worthington.

Personal Data Store providers we assessed

We’ve heard about the consequences of mass personal data mining — from manipulating elections to exploiting people’s neuroses. Companies keep basing their business models around tracking their users and selling that data. Data breaches and unsavory uses of all this information clearly infringe personal privacy, but what’s the alternative beyond becoming a cave-dwelling hermit?

One that’s come up time after time is the Personal Data Store (PDS) model. This post looks into some leading solutions and assesses the prospects.

Our hypotheses: 

When we started our research, there was a number of concerns and assumptions we wanted to test. 

Our worries were that PDSs:
Don’t have a market and adoption figures are low.
Are too much hard work (either for non-technical users or in terms of time and effort to be one’s own data broker).
Don’t provide any advantage to the user over existing models apart from privacy (a.k.a “what new superpower does it give me?”).
Don’t integrate with existing social platforms where people’s network lives.
Are unrealistic and will fail to deliver major privacy and data control shifts.   ... "