One of the rumbling debates over the past few years, pressed energetically by some privacy activists, has been around potential new models for managing personal data held by government. It was picked up by a few people in the Conservative party before the general election, and has often been attached to warnings about the potential for the state to abuse the existing plethora of databases. With that in mind, it was a surprise last week that the government threw the spotlight onto how the private rather than public sector uses people's data.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) unveiled its midata initiative, in which a number of companies have agreed to give consumers access to all the data held on them in electronic format. The next step will be the development of online personal data repositories (PDRs) for each customer, which in the longer term (and it's better to emphasise the 'longer') could be brought together into data stores for individuals that draw from different sources.
The connections to the government's open data agenda were quite visible: its prime adviser on the subject, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, was on the stand at the BIS launch and spoke about the transformational capacity for public and private sectors. He also said the announcement could be a step towards the development of individuals' repositories of data from dealings with government and business - something remiscent of the Mydex personal data store model which has been piloted by a few public authorities.
The companies involved in midata are taking part voluntarily, there are only 19 of them, and it would be a surprise if there are more than a few takers in the short term. But it's notable that they are taking the step before any government agency.
It may be because they are better placed to do so, and they see it as a useful marketing tool at a time when consumers are becoming more interested in what companies know about them and how they use the information. This raises the question of whether government can delay a similar move for long, especially if it sparks a trend that would soon creep into the public awareness.
Ed Davey, the consumer affairs minister, claimed that midata would help to drive the open data agenda forward, and Shadbolt said it was "lighting a fuse" that would pressure public authorities to release the same kind of data. But it lacks any clear incentive for them to follow suit, the spending cuts are creating a lot of other priorities, and it would require a massive cultural shift to make it seem the natural way of doing things.
Midata is to be welcomed, but it's unlikely to kick off a widespread change by itself. That's going to need something more - a big carrot, a big stick, or more likely a combination of both - to get government as a whole to get the data into the open.
Mark Say is editor of Guardian Government Computing.
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