Microsoft is reportedly working on a project codenamed ‘Bali’ which is designed to give users control of data collected about them. Bali is privately being developed by Microsoft and there hasn’t been much information available about the project. A webpage was hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform, confirming the existence of the tool. Authorized users could sign in and manage their data through this webpage. The webpage, however, has since been taken down.
Bali was first revealed in a tweet by a Twitter user called “Longhorn”, which funny enough, was the codename of Windows Vista. The tweet describes Bali as “a project that can delete all your connection and account information (inverseprivacyproject).”
The about page for the project Bali describes it as “new personal data bank which puts users in control of all data collected about them…. The bank will enable users to store all data (raw and inferred) generated by them. It will allow the user to visualize, manage, control, share and monetize the data.”
Bali seems to be based on Inverse Privacy which was a research paper by Yuri Gurevich, Efim Hudis, and Jeannette M. Wing, who all worked with Microsoft research at that time. According to the research, an item of personal information is inversely private if another entity has access to it but the creator/user does not. An individual’s interaction with different institution generates a lot of inversely private data which could prove beneficial for the users, as was noted by the researchers.
The about section of Bali says the project is in its initial stage and we might have some time before the final reveal of the project. The developers are working on helping users aggregate their data from different websites.
Since the Facebook controversy about illegal data collection on its users, there has been a cacophony regarding the privacy of the individual. Microsoft might benefit from releasing a project that gives users the ability to view and control their data.