While Personal Data Stores (PDSs) aim to support personal data management and enable data portability across applications, user interest remains limited. This study explores the factors influencing user adoption and willingness to share data across four PDS use case scenarios—HR, Media, Finance, and Health—through an iterative research-through-design approach. The study combined a large-scale survey (n = 2,335), prototype development, expert reviews (n = 10), and user testing (n = 17). Findings reveal that although security concerns persist, participants responded positively to the PDS concept, particularly for use cases that reduce administrative burdens. Notably, users who engaged with the prototype reported higher intentions to use and greater willingness to share data than those evaluating written scenarios. These findings highlight the importance of tangible user experiences in shaping perceptions of PDSs. The study concludes with actionable recommendations and an illustrative prototype to inform effective user-centred PDS implementation.

This study explores users’ perceptions of integrating a personal data store to enhance personalized recommendations within a streaming service. Using a research-through-design approach and guided by Human Data Interaction principles (legibility, agency, and negotiability), we developed an enhanced streaming service prototype. This prototype was evaluated by experts (n=5), refined, and then used in two focus groups (n=19) to gauge participants’ reactions to the personal data store integration and their willingness to share different data types for enhanced personalized streaming recommendations. The focus groups revealed mixed reactions to the personal data store, with users weighing curiosity against concerns. However, many of the implemented data transparency and control features helped to mitigate these doubts. By linking our findings to existing literature, we developed a set of design recommendations to help businesses and guide future research in building personal data store applications, further advancing the field of Human Data Interaction.

Abstract The continuing decline of trust in the processing and fair use of personal data has been well documented. A web standard called Solid (SOcial LInked Data) is being developed to halt and mitigate the decline. It puts users in control of their data by enabling them to securely store their data in decentralized personal online data stores (pods). However, little is known about the impact of such pods. Therefore, we measured the effects of the use of a Solid pod on users’ perceived transparency, understanding, control and trust, as well as on usability and behavioural intention. We set up an experiment that compares the perceptions of users about how their data is being processed and stored on a cookies-enabled news recommendation website with a similar Solid-pod-enabled news recommendation website. Although our findings do not provide evidence that this has significantly impacted users’ trust, perceived usability, or intention to use the system, it has been found to significantly impact users’ perceived transparency and control.

The transformation of society towards a digital economy and government austerity creates a new context leading to changing roles for both government and private sector. Boundaries between public and private services are blurring, enabling government and private sector to collaborate and share responsibilities. In Belgium, the regional Government of Flanders embedded the re-use of public sector information in its legislation and published a data portal containing well over 4000 Open Datasets. Due to a lack of interoperability, interconnecting and interpreting these sources of information remain challenges for public administrations, businesses and citizens. To dissolve the boundaries between the data silos, the Flemish government applied Linked Data design principles in an operational public sector context. This paper discusses the trends we have identified while ‘rewiring’ the Authentic Source for addresses to a Linked Base Registry. We observed the impact on multiple interoperability levels; namely on the legal, organisational, semantic and technical level. In conclusion Linked Data can increase semantic and technical interoperability and lead to a better adoption of government information in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from the past thirteen years in the region of Flanders could speed up processes in other countries that are facing the complexity of raising technical and semantic interoperability.

As information technology is increasingly embedded in our cities, opportunities arise to design novel applications that benefit urban communities. We describe the design and evaluation of ZWERM (Dutch for the term 'swarm'), a public game that was specifically designed for augmenting community participation in urban neighborhoods. A network of ten components has been designed, some of which had different interfaces and design approaches: from totem-like Trees for gathering around with RFID cards to playful Sparrows that react on whistle sounds. After implementing the urban game in two city neighborhoods, we investigated the impact of each of these components on their communities. Our insights are useful for the public interaction design of future urban, interactive networks that aim to positively influence community participation and social cohesion.

Since its launch in 2005, video-sharing service YouTube has become one of the most popular Web 2.0 platforms with a daily increment of over 150,000 videos. Still, despite the large research body on the platform, it remains unclear for whom ordinary YouTube users upload their videos. A first qualitative study indicates that uploaders distinguish three types within YouTube's networked public. First, videos are uploaded for a select group of people with whom the uploader shares an offline bond (offline-identified public). Second, uploaders define part of their potential viewers as people with whom they are unfamiliar, but with whom they share a similar interest, opinion or practice (online-identified public). Third, uploaders also take into account the YouTube platform as a whole (online-unidentified public). A second, quantitative study of 450 recent uploaders validates these findings and tests the proposed associations with the importance that is attributed to receiving different types of feedback. As hypothesised, the expectancy of an offline-identified public positively predicts both offline and online off-platform feedback, while expecting an online-identified public positively predicts both on- and off-platform online feedback. However, the expectancy of an online-unidentified public yields a negative prediction for on-platform feedback.