Data PortabilityGovernment
Singapore’s Leaders Asked OpenDataLabs How to Make AI Work
Singapore has decided that AI runs on trusted access to people’s data. The practical question at the Tanglin Club was how an agency or a company actually makes that data move.
Singapore's refreshed National AI Strategy makes one of its ten priorities to unlock datasets, underpinned by strong data governance, for the four national AI Missions in manufacturing, financial services, connectivity and healthcare. The Personal Data Protection Act already carries a data portability obligation: a person can ask an organisation to send their data straight to another, in a form the receiving organisation can read. The direction is set. What every agency and company now has to work out is the method.
OpenDataLabs builds and operates the products governments and industry run on Vana, the open network where personal data moves with the permission of the person it belongs to, and a record of every move.
OpenDataLabs joined senior business leaders and government officials for a roundtable with the MIT Club of Singapore at the Tanglin Club. The conversation kept returning to three practical problems.
Letting a person’s data move without rebuilding the systems an organisation already runs
Most AI projects do not fail on the model. They fail on context. The data that would make a product useful sits in another system, another department or another company, and there is no approved way to move it. The usual workarounds do not survive contact with a regulator. Bulk data-sharing agreements are slow to negotiate and hard to audit. Scraping is off the table. A bespoke integration for every source does not scale. What works is letting the person bring their own data, with a clear grant of what it can be used for, into the systems an organisation already has.
Keeping the data under the right jurisdiction while it moves
Three things have to be true. The person gives permission for a specific use. Every movement is recorded, so anyone can see what was agreed. And the data stays under the right jurisdiction the whole way. For governments and enterprises that need data held under their own law, we run hosting for personal servers. The data stays where policy says it should, and it can still move when the person chooses.
Starting without taking on risk you cannot manage
Start with one journey where a person’s own data would make a service measurably better. Put permission and a record at the centre of it. Keep the data under your jurisdiction. Build on an open standard so the work does not lock you in.
What OpenDataLabs builds
Context Gateway handles permissioned data movement: the route to the data people already hold on platforms an organisation cannot reach, arriving with the person's permission and a record of what they agreed. It conforms to the standard for how personal data moves, hosted at Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, which does what Singapore's portability obligation asks for, so the method is one a regulator can point to rather than one company's proprietary approach. Underneath it sits the Vana network, already carrying real volume: 1.5 million users and more than 20 million transactions. Our customers do not wait for an ecosystem to form. It is already running.
Singapore is investing more than S$1 billion in public AI research through 2030, on top of some of the most advanced digital identity and public service infrastructure in the world. The organisations that get the most from it will be the ones that can draw on real context from real people, with their permission. If you are working out where AI can start delivering for the people you serve, we would like to hear from you.