Engineering and deployment of the Personal Data Safe (P-DS) for PIMCity

With the fast development of a society that bases its economy on the web, almost forcing millions and millions of users to utilize new applications, forms, games, movie platforms and more, directly from the internet, we have noticed how gathering and collecting user personal data has become of fundamental importance. This is sponsored as to be a feature that helps customize the user experience depending of the individual tastes and likes. But personal data should not be given away so easily. Most of the online services do not inform the user on how their data are used, manipulated or even distributed. Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) try to give users control over their data, by configuring a central, safe location to store all their personal information and manage the distribution in a simple and intuitive manner, while giving feedback back to the user on the status of their stored and distributed data. PIMCity is a European project that is implementing this technology, based on a set of different tools. One main component of PIMCity is the Personal Data Safe (PDS), a platform to securely store the personal data, with a friendly user interface which allows for easy interaction and gather of information. PDS will then interact with other PIMCity components for the management of authorizations and accessibility to the stored data. In this work I will explain and analyse the implementation of the PDS as a full-stack web application, built from a previously developed version and improved using the latest cutting edge technologies and designs. The future of technology is deeply infused into the development of internet applications and web services in general. We believe that protecting the users from leading IT companies which exploit the power of their platform to force the free and uncontrolled delivery of personal information is of outermost importance, and we think that PIMCity might be a balanced and right solution to a shared pool of controlled information.