I manage technology for a city of 33,000 people. Part of my job is understanding where data lives, who has access to it, and what happens when those answers change without warning. I think about data governance professionally.
So when I looked at my own personal data, including my family’s health records, our business transactions, our calendars, our email, and our location history, and realized I had less control over it than I give my city employees over theirs, that bothered me.
Not in a tinfoil hat way. In an engineering way.
The Reality
Here’s the situation most people are in, whether they realize it or not.
Your health data lives in Apple Health or Google Fit. Your spending history is spread across your bank, Venmo, Square, and PayPal. Your location history sits on a Google server. Your photos are in iCloud. Your personal calendar is in Google. Your email is in Gmail.
Each of these platforms has its own privacy policy, its own data retention rules, and its own business model. You agreed to all of them, probably without reading any of them. And every one of those agreements includes language that lets the company change the terms whenever they want.
In my professional world, we’d call that a data governance problem. At home, most people just call it normal.
I don’t think it should be.
What I Built
I built a system called MegaMind. It’s a personal data lake, a single platform running on a small server in my house that aggregates data from the services my family already uses and stores it locally, under our control.
My health data flows in automatically from my iPhone. Steps, resting heart rate, weight, sleep duration. Not just today’s numbers, but historical trends I can analyze over months and years.
My wife runs our small retail shop, My Country Story. I connected her Square account and pulled in years of transaction history. Every sale, every item, every trend. She can now see her best-selling products, seasonal patterns, and inventory gaps in a dashboard we own, instead of relying on Square’s interface and Square’s data retention policies.
Weather forecasts, news feeds, email summaries, family calendars, website analytics. All of it feeds into one system. One place to query. One place to secure. One place to back up.
The data never leaves our network. It doesn’t feed anyone’s ad targeting. It doesn’t train anyone’s machine learning model. It sits on hardware I own, in a house I own, protected by policies I set.
Why This Matters
I’m not anti-cloud. I use cloud services every day at work. The cloud is a tool, and it’s a good one.
But there’s a difference between choosing to use a service and having no alternative. Right now, most people’s personal data is entirely dependent on corporate platforms. If Google changes their Photos storage policy, you comply or you lose your pictures. If Apple changes how Health data exports work, you adapt or you lose access. If Square changes their API terms, your business history is at their discretion.
This isn’t hypothetical. These things happen regularly. Services shut down. APIs get deprecated. Free tiers disappear. Terms change.
As a CIO, I’d never build critical city infrastructure on a platform where a single vendor controls all the data and can change the rules unilaterally. That’s just basic risk management. But somehow, we all accept exactly that arrangement for our personal lives.
MegaMind is my answer to that. It’s not about distrust. It’s about redundancy, control, and treating my family’s data with the same rigor I’d apply to any system I’m responsible for.
Where This Is Going
The platform is expanding. I’m building a health dashboard with a timeline interface where you can slide back and forth through years of health data and watch trends emerge. I’m adding financial aggregation so I can see our complete picture in one place. Smart home data, vehicle maintenance logs, even the kids’ school calendars.
The real power shows up when you can query across all of it. When all your data lives in one system, you can ask questions that no single app can answer. How does my sleep quality correlate with my activity level? What seasonal patterns affect the store’s revenue? Which months do our energy costs spike, and does that line up with the weather?
That’s not science fiction. That’s just SQL against a well-structured database. The data already exists. It’s just scattered across a dozen platforms that will never talk to each other voluntarily.
This also feeds into our morning briefings. My wife and I each get our own individualized, automated summary every morning. Hers includes store performance, inventory alerts, and her schedule. Mine covers local and world news, Red Sox and Yankees standing, Cyber Security News, etc. Both include weather, the kids’ events, health stats, and anything else that matters for the day ahead. Not assembled from six different apps. One system. Personalized views. Every morning.
What You Can Do
You don’t need to be a CIO to start thinking about this. You don’t even need to be technical, though it helps.
Start by seeing what’s out there. Download your data from Google Takeout. Request your Apple Privacy report. Pull your Facebook data archive. Most people have never done this, and the volume of information these companies hold about you is eye-opening.
And if you want a recent example of why this matters, read the technical analysis of the White House’s new mobile app where a security researcher decompiled it and found GPS tracking every 4.5 minutes, JavaScript injection that strips privacy controls from third-party websites, and code loaded from a random person’s GitHub Pages. It’s a good reminder that the organizations asking for your data don’t always handle it the way you’d expect.
Then start asking the questions I ask about every system at work. Where does this data live? Who has access to it? What happens if the provider changes their terms? What’s my backup plan?
Self-hosted software has gotten dramatically easier in the last few years. Open-source tools exist for health tracking, financial management, home automation, and document storage. AI is closing the gap between “you need to be a developer” and “you need to be able to describe what you want.” The barrier to entry drops every year.
Data sovereignty isn’t a radical idea. It’s the same principle every competent IT organization applies to critical systems: maintain control over your data, ensure redundancy, and don’t build on foundations someone else can pull out from under you.
The only difference is applying it to your own life.
Andy Watkins is the Chief Information Officer of Rochester, New Hampshire, a Marine Corps veteran, and a farmer. He writes about technology, local government, and building things that probably should have existed already. Find him at awatkins.io.