Personal data vault to export and license your own data
Problem
A European user wants a tool to collect and centralize the data they've already shared with FAANG platforms (ChatGPT history, emails, social posts, search history) via existing GDPR export mechanisms — and then selectively share or even sell it to companies like Mistral that need training data. No product today makes exercising data portability practical or valuable to the individual.
Opportunity
A GDPR-native personal data vault: one-click imports from major platforms, a unified private store, and consented sharing/licensing pipelines to AI companies — turning a legal right nobody uses into actual user value.
Market analysis
The vault half of this has been tried before — Inrupt/Solid built consent-based personal data pods and digi.me retreated from the broad vision into Dutch health records. The licensing half (selling your data to AI companies) is the genuinely novel part, but demand from buyers for individual-scale data is entirely unproven.
Market · Privacy-conscious European users of US platforms; the seller side is motivated, but the buyer side (AI companies) has no established channel for individual data.
Pricing · No consumer comparable charges for this; any revenue would be rev-share on data licensing, which has no proven per-user economics.
Pros
- + GDPR portability rights provide a legal foundation that already exists.
- + European AI labs do have a real, stated appetite for EU training data.
- + No polished consumer product occupies this exact position today.
Cons
- − Importing and normalizing every platform's export format is endless toil.
- − Buyer side is unproven — AI companies buy datasets at scale, not per-person.
- − Inrupt/Solid already covers the vault-plus-consent architecture as open source.
- − Trust barrier is enormous: asking users to pool their most sensitive data.
Existing / similar tools
Source
Hacker News (Ask HN)
The graveyard this idea walks past is worth staring at: digi.me raised real money on exactly this consumer-vault thesis and ended up as a Dutch medical records app, while Solid remains an enterprise pilot story. That history says the import-and-store half is a commodity nobody monetizes, not a product. The only version with a business model is the licensing pipeline — but buyers like Mistral purchase bulk, curated, license-clean datasets, and an individual’s chat history is neither. A solo builder’s realistic wedge is selling picks and shovels: clean, per-platform GDPR export parsers, which the ecosystem lacks regardless of whether personal data markets ever materialize.