The BBC is spearheading a new more democratic and fair Internet infrastructure where they just borrow our data to give us personalised content.

This means building a new system that allows the BBC to enrich its user data with the same users’ data from Netflix and Spotify and give the users personalised recommendations on BBC content. The BBC itself should not have any access at all to the data from Netflix or Spotify.

This is the interesting experiment which BBC Research and Development is working on. It could be called “ethical personalisation” and it’s the opposite of what is happening today in the personalisation business, where companies typically collect and sit on all the data.