Digi.Me allowing personal control of your own data. But can the model work?

Just had a friend send me a link as follows: Digi.me bags $6.1M to put users in the driving seat for sharing personal data TechCrunch article. What a great little project with incredibly ambitious plans. From what I can tell here is their approach... Google gets to leverage their incredible user base by offering services in return for looking over the shoulder of their users and monetizing what they find out, usually by advertising.

Digi.me asks users upfront to trust them with your personal data and then goes about hawking it or distributing it with your express approval. If it is used by a company for income then they may sure you as the user gets a benefit.. but the basic difference is that Google asks for forgiveness after the fact of sharing your data (while assuring us they will "do no evil") and Digi.me asks for permission... up front.

This approach will be a long haul. But it's a big prise.

Could Haventec do this with their Digital Wallet product? Maybe. 

Aggregating data from multiple sites such as merchant and healthcare webs sites into one repository as a service (or an app on your phone) for everyone who uses Haventec digital wallet is a possibility technically. Doing this for everyday tasks such as storing credit cards, drivers license numbers etc is a real possibility... but my thinking is that it would be a mistake to try and make a big play like this when it is something that you would normally associate with a bank, a government service or a large trusted corporation... maybe Haventec will be that big.