Personal Data Safe: a flexible storage system for personal data

With the global diffusion of Internet, the number of actions and operations performed online has increased exponentially: for example, e-commerce is the preferred means for shopping nowadays, while Google Maps seems to have definitely replaced the traditional paper maps. Behind all these useful services, organizations that own websites are involved in a profitable data market, where users' data are sold by publishers to vendors. In this way, data buyers try to understand users' behaviour in order to present them the most suitable ads according to their recent online activity. The publication of the GDPR in May 2018 however focused the attention of companies and especially users on the possible security and privacy issues that can emerge while browsing the Internet. These new guidelines increased the concern about how user data is managed and define which users rights each organization must ensure. One of the first consequences have been small and slow changes in the scenario of data management, with websites trying to be as clear as possible on data collection and use. Novel systems for data protection and storage are becoming more popular as well. In this context, the so called PDS (Personal Data Store) appeared, looking for providing a secure way to store people data. In this work is presented the design and the implementation details of the Personal Data Safe, a data store system that has been developed as part of the PDS of PIMCity, a European project that aims to provide a standard definition of Personal Data Store and an easy modular way to build new ones out of basic building blocks. The PIMCity PDS groups together the main features of the major PDS on the market and tries to provide a development kit to let organizations define their own system, according to their needs and goals. The Personal Data Safe is one of these building blocks and it's the means for storing data. The system is built on top of the Django framework, using the Python language and manages to offer a flexible environment where users can potentially store any kind of data; this is possible thanks to the presence of an administrator-created schema, that defines the configuration of the whole system. The final prototype has been designed also to be able to interact and connect with the other PIMCity components, which offers further functionalities to build a complete PDS.