My personal digital assistant

Today everyone is trying to collect information about you except you. Music services like spotify and Pandora want to know what you like to listen and suggest songs that you will like. Netflix uses your viewing history to suggest movies you might like. Amazon is tracking your shopping habits. In short there is a whole category of businesses that are finding ingenious ways to collect information about you and then use it to offer products and services. 

The person who has the greatest opportunity to collect information about you is yourself. Why should I collect information about myself, you may ask. The fact of the matter is that computer programs have become smarter than your brain when it comes to making a choice from large number of options. For example if you would like to pick a book to read, you may research maybe 50 books and pick one. Now imagine a computer program that can analyze a thousand books to find one that best matches your likes. Today your best bet is to ask amazon and it will tell you based on the books you have purchased from Amazon before. Now imagine if you had an app that you used to keep track of your likes and dislikes. This app knows all the books you have ever read in your life and collected whatever other information is required to recommend books. 

The privacy concerns that keep lot of us awake are a very real cause for concern in letting any company collect a lot of information about us. But if each individual could control their information, the privacy concerns could be alleviated for the most part. Hackers could steal it but having it distributed would make it much harder for hackers to steal a lot of personal information for lot of people. 

How would you use the information you collect on yourself? You would need the ability to authorize other apps to access parts of your personal digital history. If you were looking for a new job, you may allow LinkedIn to access your job experience and skills information to match with open jobs. Companies like spotiffy, Pandora, Amazon, facebook and Google would really work on developing agents that can access parts of your personal information and provide the service you need.

It is not too hard to think of the components that would be needed to put together an app that would collect information about you, organize and make the pieces parts available to authorized agents. What we need is an organization that would organize the development of such a product, market it and support it. 

I am calling it a personal digital assistant. Palm pilot was the first popular PDA, but the concept above has the potential to become your new personal digital assistant that is so much more powerful and useful that it will be integral to your life. It will be your portal to the digital world. It will record and know everything about you and instantly support you in getting the most out of the future world of big data and IoT. It will help you find a job, a mate, assist you with health care, file your taxes, find business partners, plan your vacations and whatever else you need.