I'm in favour of making it easy for individuals to own their 'digital' life.
However, simply having a 'data store' isn't enough. You need to have a system that actually runs some infrastructure for you and then 'data collection' is an obvious side-effect. There are number of projects I'm involved with that take different approaches to this, including technical infrastructure for distributed systems and personal clouds [1,3] as well as business models and market places [2]. Systems like these can provide benefits to end-users that include resilience and flexibility -- it's not just about privacy.
However, simply having a 'data store' isn't enough. You need to have a system that actually runs some infrastructure for you and then 'data collection' is an obvious side-effect. There are number of projects I'm involved with that take different approaches to this, including technical infrastructure for distributed systems and personal clouds [1,3] as well as business models and market places [2]. Systems like these can provide benefits to end-users that include resilience and flexibility -- it's not just about privacy.
[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ and http://openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage
[2] http://hubofallthings.com/what-is-the-hat/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020635