3.5. The Helsinki profile (MyData principles)

The Helsinki profile is an ongoing project focusing on the development of a personal user account for the City’s digital services. The vision for the Helsinki profile is a user account for the City’s customers, through which customers will be able to, with a single login, access the City’s services, manage their personal data and provide consent for the sharing of their data for purposes other than the ones which the data was originally collected for.

The operating principle of the Helsinki profile is to retrieve the customer’s basic information in real time from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency’s system, which contains the names, personal identity codes and permanent addresses of all Finnish citizens. The Helsinki profile would thus always contain up-to-date basic information that could be accessed by the City’s operators. The customer would be able to supplement their Helsinki profile with their own electronic contact details and secondary addresses. The Helsinki profile makes it so that residents only need to provide certain key information (such as their phone number, e-mail address) once instead of having to provide them for every service separately. City services can also supplement the information stored in the Helsinki profile with service-specific information from their own information systems.

In addition to serving as a common user account, the Helsinki profile offers a consent management mechanism that complies with MyData principles and maintains records of other grounds for data processing in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation. With the help of the consent management mechanism, customers can define what data collected about them the City is allowed to utilise in the City’s ecosystem and how. All data sharing and utilisation is based on Finnish and EU data protection legislation.