What is FIDU?
The First International Data Union is a not-for-profit purpose-driven organisation that aims to give individuals and communities control and agency over their data. It does this by stewarding members' data with an absolute duty of loyalty to them. It ensures and enables that data is used in accordance with members' values. It will deliver both private and collective benefits to members.
Who we are?
The founding team is made up of Tony Curzon Price, Keziah Halliday and Oli Robinson. The project has received seed funding from the Eutopia Foundation.
Tech & Roadmap
FIDU is building technology infrastructure to enable data democracy and give individuals control over their digital footprint. Our roadmap includes:
Phase 1: Foundation (Current)
- FIDU Vault, a local persoanl data store (status - released to members)
- FIDU Chat Grabber, a chrome plugin to store your LLM chat histories from the major vendors (status - released to members)
- FIDU Chat Lab, an app that allows you to manage your histories and contexts, and to port them to any LLM (status - September 2025)
Phase 2: Data Infrastructure (Next 6 months)
- Secure data vault for member data storage
- Consent management system for data sharing
- Data union governance dashboard
- Integration with existing data sources
Phase 3: Collective Benefits (6-12 months)
- Data marketplace for collective bargaining
- Privacy-preserving analytics tools
- Member-driven research and data projects
- Partnerships with ethical data users
Phase 4: Ecosystem (12+ months)
- FIDU-Core: Open source data union platform
- FIDU-Apps: Member-developed applications
- Inter-union collaboration and data sharing
- Global data union network
Our technology is designed with privacy-first principles, using open standards and building on existing open source tools. We believe in transparency and community-driven development.
Get Involved
We are building the team and looking for help. Reach out at hello@firstdataunion.org
Some recent blog posts by Tony related to what we are doing
- How does enshittification come to LLMs and how to stop it?
- Charlie Chaplin, Simone Weil, Black Mirror - how we should be responding to the announcements this week about LLM memory & personalisation
- What is the equivalent of not buying Teslas in our existence as guests of cyber-Hotel California?
- Meta will apparently now "respect people's choices about how their data is used" in the UK. How should that conversation go? And why it needs data union
- AI-powered second brain? Yes please, but not on those terms