Tell Your Story Once…
A number of ‘friends of DataPal’ have pointed to this great video from Martin Lewis and said ‘isn’t that what DataPal enables?’.
Skip to 07:40 of 17:37 if you only watch one bit of this excellent narrative.
To cut to the chase, if you don’t watch the video, Martin is saying in a Parliamentary Select Committee….
I will throw in one final point while I have my money and mental health hat on. Let us picture a physically disabled person or someone with a severe mental health problem, including potentially going into NHS mental health crisis care. I have my water company, my energy company and my broadband company. I also have my mobile company, my bank and my insurer. Let us imagine I am in a crisis mental health state. I am in a fundamental anxiety situation. I am potentially going to be hospitalised. Just to go back, we have had people come out of NHS mental health crisis care who on the day they get back have bailiffs at their door, so this is not a small issue. At that point, I have to call up my water company and tell them, “I’m sorry, I’m going through a mental health crisis at the moment.” Then I have to call my energy company, and then I have to call my broadband provider, my mobile provider, my bank and my insurer. These things are detrimental to my mental health.
There is no “tell them once” system and no “tell them once” database. There are data privacy issues with all this that would need to be handled, and it could only be done on a voluntary basis. You are talking about three different regulators. This is no criticism of them—they have their remits on this—but these issues do not live in isolation from people’s finances. They are a subset of everything that people deal with. We have a fundamentally intransigent system that puts the burden on the vulnerable individual at moments of vulnerability to declare their vulnerability. It should not be like that in a digital world. This is the one time where we are actually capable.
We need to have a centralised system where you can volunteer to tell them once, and after telling them once, it should go to all essential service and public service providers, as long as you are happy with that with — there should be data privacy, and it should be a voluntary system, not a compulsory one. We need to start working that way. The fact that it is done on a tripartite level is almost a problem from the start.
Source: https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/17851/html/
Needless to say, we think he is 100% right at the top level; but we’d have suggestions about the practicalities and the broader context. The bits we would specifically pick up on…
There is no “tell them once” system and no “tell them once” database. There are data privacy issues with all this that would need to be handled, and it could only be done on a voluntary basis.
It should not be like that in a digital world. This is the one time where we are actually capable.
We need to have a centralised system where you can volunteer to tell them once, and after telling them once, it should go to all essential service and public service providers, as long as you are happy with that with—there should be data privacy, and it should be a voluntary system, not a compulsory one. We need to start working that way.
The key words in there that we have a perspective on are ‘them’, ‘once’, ‘digital’, ‘centralised’ and ‘voluntary’.
‘Them’ is critically important from the architectural perspective. It very clearly means that the solution required STARTS WITH INDIVIDUALS. It must involve building tools that start with empowering individuals.
‘Once’ is clearly another critical architectural principle. ‘Twice’ is not a valid option; the architecture must support and directly enable ‘telling them once’ then it is the wrong architectural model.
‘Digital’ is clearly the only feasible deployment model; therefore the concepts of guardianship, delegation and powers of attorney must be built in natively to the architecture - along with support models for those unable or unwilling to operate digitally.
‘Centralised’ is the one we push back on. Whilst solutions must underpin outcomes that appear centralised; i.e. they work the same way for all consumers of the service (protocol); the underlying technical model must have significant aspects of decentralisation. Whilst down in the weeds, this point is really simple - centralised technical approaches to this issue will not succeed at the necessary scale. Decentralised approaches will because they are designed for this situation.
‘Voluntary’ - Martin nails it on this one. The primary reason current models for ‘tell us’ have failure built in is because they do not address the alignment of incentives problem. To be specific, organisations currently have all the incentives they need to justify maintaining their own ‘tell us’ channels. Solutions that succeed at scale in the ‘tell them’ space will clearly understand and change that incentive model so that ‘going to the source’ becomes a much better option than ‘maintaining our own silo-ed record.
And then, of course, the giant problem amongst several big problems….
‘There are data privacy issues with all this that would need to be handled’
Yes there are, and they are not fixed by doing more of what we do now - assuming organisations or regulators can come up with a design to give such a system enough air cover and some rules to comply with. There has not as yet been a digital data type that has not been co-opted in directions that were not intended. UK Biobank being one such great example. Data privacy must be a feature in a Tell Them Once system not a bug.
The scale solution to this issue is what DataPal is working towards - this is part technology, not least some new capabilities from agentic AI; but also that alignment of incentives. DataPal acts for individuals on a fiduciary basis - with the duty of loyalty and duty of care responsibilities that this implies. We are also clearly a ‘data intermediary’, a class of organisation thankfully now fully acknowledged in the EU, and working its way through legislation in UK within the Data Use and Access Act.
Taking a step back then…
This is not a new problem. Royal Mail back in the 1990’s, alongside The Post Office, designed a well thought through, all sector approach to ‘Tell Us Once’ with the above design principles. It was too early and the technology could not really support the design (it now can). As is often the case, when feasible parts were then operationalised bits of it got chopped out, or put in the ‘too hard’ box. Surviving bits of that morphed and headed off in different directions; some still visible today - death notification being one such component.
We now believe that all of the component parts of a fully functional ‘Tell Them Once’ capability are now in place; and significantly standardised in the technical sense. Seedlings of that are already running operationally in crisis support operations elsewhere in the world.
We also believe that ‘Tell Them Once’ is a much bigger and more important scenario than the crisis related one that Martin Lewis points to. It also applies in commercial scenarios; why would a person want to tell multiple organisations the same details about the product/ service i’m looking for when they could use ‘Tell Them Once’ methods to share those details without compromising privacy? Indeed adding the commercial implications into the mix likely funds the entirety of the ‘data for good’ use cases such as crisis support and many others.
The obvious point, back to those friends of DataPal saying ‘isn’t that what DataPal does?’ then yes it is - we have capabilities across all of the above. But ultimately are a small start-up with a big aspiration. So please get in touch if you’d like to work with us to help build out the above.
Footnote and a Call to Action
If you are:
Designing smart data schemes
Regulating data exchange
Building platforms or AI systems
Then the question is NOT:
“How do we implement another scheme?”
But:
“Are we building towards a network or away from one?”
We’re currently partnering with a small number of Organisations and Partners to explore these ideas through targeted proofs of concept. If you’re thinking seriously about the future of Smart Data, AI, and individual data control, we’d be interested in hearing from you.