Innovate UK: Regain control of your online digital footprint

Funded by Innovate UK (formerly the UK Government's Technology Strategy Board) under the call 'Enhancing the Value of Interactions with Digital Content' the project is a collaboration with CitizenMe Ltd. and the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience. It centres on CitizenMe applications designed to put everyday users of the internet back in control of their own digital identities. The service will provide citizens with greater transparency on the use and proliferation of their personal digital data and empower them to safely transact their data with companies. The project will focus on developing predictive algorithms and research tools to drive these insights. The system will be accessible through the CitizenMe mobile app and integrated online tools that can deliver research outputs directly to the public.

A focus of the project will be to extract psychological and emotional information from samples of text and other digital records of language use such as SMS data stored on users' devices, social media statuses posted online, voice recordings, secondary datasets from partner companies and various open-source databases. This research should culminate in providing a predictive algorithm that translates samples of text into deep psychological and emotional insights, which is integrated in the CitizenMe application and which can learn from evolving user behaviour over time.

The CitizenMe app is available for download for iOS and Android.