Fatemeh: why do consumers care? Jason: consumers have a sense of things being out of control. Todd: clients desperately looking for meaningful way to interact with consumers. On supply side, it’s new territory. Huge demand on marketer’s side. Shane: at core, we realize that who has access to our data shapes our experience, access, opportunities. Value: there’s a blindspot about what data is worth in additional value exchange. The more you start to see the opportunities as tangible, the more value is obtainable. Mary: This event is at a good time. As users get stalked online, they become aware that something’s happening, don’t know what to do, start calling senators. Opportunity for alternative to Do Not Track legislation, market solutions.

Fatemeh: privacy audits, do they provide a false sense of security when the government starts to audit the big companies? Shane: follow the money: big money in top right corner of Facebook (strong tie to advertising). People are waking up in unexpected ways to see connections between dollars and sense. Survey in their marketing: difference between “stuff in the attic that might be sold” vs “spy or thief in my attic.”  Jason: general awareness, at consumer level it’s my data, Sand Hill Road and companies that make money monetizing personal data. He’d like to see Silicon Valley invest in this respect as better model. Mary: zooming out a bit, how this works revolves around incentives (shipping parties, 3rd parties) and how they’re structured, and how does that structure support the business model? Going back down to audits: they’re meant to inspire fear as provocation to do the right thing. But how to incentivize the parties to do the right thing from consumer’s perspective?

Fatemeh to Todd: privacy and audits, marketing disconnect, who do we talk with in these organizations to make a difference? Todd: I wish it were one person such as a data steward, but that’s really rare. Our data is traveling around the web, should be easy to capture it for free. As long as this disconnect persists among marketers, no incentive to contribute to solving “a problem.”

Jason: Infrastructure needs to be put in place. Shane: lots of teaching, CEOs don’t understand how they got in the Wall Street Journal for spying on people. Mary: we talk to folks in advertising and trade agencies, Salesforce and CRM companies, media buying entities… right now they’re heavy users of personal data online. Folks are getting on board, need to know what business model is and how to fix this. Jason: there’s an enterprise need for interoperability too. Business model will be around easy access to customer control of data.

Fatemeh: industries that will help propel this forward, who has the most to lose and the most to gain? Jason: it’s the #2 in every market. Mary: banking and finance, there’s a lot to gain, high value in helping with most basic functions (e.g., reconciling statements with Mint), documenting meta-data around trades of data. Shane: agree that #2, 3, 4 players have a lot to gain. This is really tough for big incumbents because of embedded complex systems. Too much friction getting access to certain kinds of data that could reinvent/innovate travel processes, for example. Smaller innovators can tool up faster. Todd: high tech firms are not traditionally big buyers of data. Drive to grow globally: lack of reputable suppliers.

Questions.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Personal Identity Management
2. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders
3. PII 2011: Making Privacy Portable

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Startup Spotlight: Disconnect
2. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders
3. PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program

Larry: privacy was a cost (or risk) of doing business, now we’re looking at empowering users in a way that generates profits. Anecdotal experience in making privacy profitable, and what we learned? Jim: customers have been coming to us (on business side) with a compliance model, wanting to see uplift in their site with TRUSTe seal. Customers have concerns, their seal helps address that. Chris B: space between customer needs and marketing efforts. “Profile Choice” allows real-time bidding on aggregate-able info, didn’t find the right mix at that time. Chris K: misunderstandings between what companies are trying to do and what customers believe they’re doing. Using data for ad targeting within a company privacy policy. Beacon became Facebook Connect.

Larry: Beacon, and Google Buzz, had unsuccessful launch: unclear purpose (benefits), generating FTC complaints. Is there something about the launch of a product or service that makes it more dangerous or risky than other times? Jim: use of large datasets are prone to claims of changing the rules. If you’re working in areas that weren’t contemplated, that can be confusing, need to think about how to advance sharing practices. Navigating these waters is extraordinarily difficult. Jim: any future change may be viewed as a breach of privacy, unexpected changes (lack of or poor communications, offer choices, does company honor user choices, no accountability). Chris K: FTC, government isn’t in a good position to deal on this level but you don’t want to attract their attention.

Larry: sources of funding? Chris: question is no longer is privacy big enough, now it’s what are the top level matters? Investment community–advertising (every $ spent wants to be more targetted). Jim: process in ad targeting space, global, and how little is online: ad people are demanding more information about who’s receiving their ads.

Larry: about your not taking public investments? Jim: happy accident.

Chris K: Forensics for providing choice or for analytics/response: there are techniques, can take better control over this as web providers to help users. Data flow as arms business: companies that need to control what’s happening on their site or people who want to offer services to consumers. Chris B: targeted ads now more transparent. Balance against malware, cookies and their sources that feels more like security.

Larry: FTC’s interest in these issues, pending legislation in Congress–how does possibility of regulations affect climate for investment? Chris K: uncertainty is a cloud, straightforward means of regulation can move industry forward. But interim finger-pointing, lobbying gaming, are problems. Likes EU model, but we’re moving away from that. Chris B: gov is crowdsourcing communities, online advertising and ad space initiatives are trying to be more self-regulating. Still uncertain, industry groups and co-regulation being brought up and talked about. Chris K: Congress is a giant consumer of these targeting services. Behavioral targeting seems to be settling. Larry: what if a new regulation passes that takes a business model out or forces… Chris K: legislation takes time to effect.

Questions. Did people that saw the TRUSTe seal click on the seal or just go with it? Chris: clicks were low, most people recognize seal as an envelope.  What are people choosing? (site can collect, store, use for ad targeting, give to 3rd parties) Chris K: policy should say. We can’t make sure people read the policy. Do I have a right not to have data collected? Ends up as different perspectives from people vs industry, investment (collect data).

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Baking Privacy into the Business
2. PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program
3. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders

Things have changed in privacy and personal information. PII-driven business models (later). Data collectors are the engine: giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, also organizations and agencies like Florida DMV (sold data to LexisNexus), also mom & pop operations. What makes information valuable? Your health and wealth, the networking you do, the Internet of things (you). What role to the aggregators play: markets for buying and selling data. Uses are infinite: research, monitoring, predictive modeling, advertising…

PII-driven business models:

• Platform plays (SAS, Hadoop, Revolution, Microsoft’s SharingInsight, CouchDB, etc.) – where everything is phoning home all the time.
• Social plays: LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus and Foursquare, but mobile is not this change. Also KISSmetrics, Klout, Zinga, hootsuite, radian6.
• Goverment plays: TSA and NSA, FBI, IRS, can buy from Facebook, Palantir (DOD).
• Privacy plays: SafetyWeb, reputation.com, TRUSTe, Singly, also Intellilight (in Detroit, attached to street lights where if there are a couple of people are there it turns audio mike and calls police), Spokeo, Datong
• Everyone plays: not just about advertising, many industries and business models benefit.

Implications for all PII players: privacy expectations, regulatory adherence (global), transparency (toward customers), crisis management. Privacy concerns are growing with consumers. Government is signalling that concern with new legislation. Companies must invest in this area, including training and certification.

Regulations: it’s confusing and will get more so. US: >30 federal states, >100 state regs for data security privacy. EU, pending legislation adds more. Bottom line; you’re going to need help here. Be transparent, be explicit about what you can’t provide. Use opt-in data options only.

Crisis management: when things to wrong, know how you are going to deal with them. Get a team and process in place. It’s about staying with the story if you can (used to be getting ahead of the story, now stay with). How to avoid a train wreck: be transparent, think global, be ready for breaches, behave as if you were worth your customers’ trust.

Question: opt-in: don’t short the short-term: be transparent. Opt in is a good way for customers to choose, is sticky.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Making Privacy Portable
2. PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program
3. PII 2011: Baking Privacy into the Business

Kara: We’ll be talking about implications of social sharing for business. Where is the business of social sharing? Fred: Facebook plus, FB is the largest platform but not the only. There will continue to be lots of important social platforms outside of FB. Roger: period of rapid adoption for first 2 years, FB has won the largest share. Cost of entry is high, social is everywhere. David: once things are that way they tend to stay that way? We didn’t name Google Plus “new, now, here” – two things we wanted to do: existing products could be done better, we saw a lot of our products would be better with baked-in sharing. Wanted to improve overall connected state. Jim: things swing from open to closed and back. Fred: top things include Tumblr, wouldn’t be in the picture but for… Mobile is really important. It’s not game over. FB is dominant but market is not devoid of opportunities. Roger: web as an app, number is going to 70% (of what?). Who is going to control the user experience? Things are not shipping on mobile. FB for many people is going to be the platform; connect then identity. Jim: we’re in the process of mapping humanity online. This is a big one. It really does a disservice to say it’s done. How are we mapping? What’s appropriate? rights? mapping social rituals. Of course there will be platforms, and we’re just getting started.

Kara: what are the key critical trends? Jim: we’re going through a new reality, reputation online, a 360 view. You can now reach across time/space. It takes a village, and we’re doing this one hut at a time, building intimate connections. David: I agree with mobile, always on. Shift to living in a world where we’re always on, leaking and sharing, what do we do with that? Kara; continuous partial attention? David: yes, how subconscious should we be? Shift to assuming the camera is always rolling. Jim: this is something we need to get use to. David: there are “many publics” (Kevin Marks said this first). Fred: Tablet is interesting. People are starting to build natively for tablets. More companies are coming to us where FB is the only login experience. This will accrue tremendous value to FB, that’s not really a good thing, especially for the developer (or the users!).

Kara: mobile platforms? Roger: Facebook and Yelp as mobile. Time to market. The thing that really scares me: we’ve lived in a world where people have not been honest with each other for too long. Income gap based on proprietary access to opportunities. Big corps (including telcos) are absolutely using our data. Jim: we’re moving through a threshold. FB is assumed to be public but it’s mostly private. (?) Social media has been like Lake Wobegone, was powerful but there’s going to be interesting consequences: what do people know about me? New product where people can know what we know about them. Too voyeuristic, not narcissistic enough.

Kara: what is sharing now? Fred: when you go out on Friday night, there’s a tremendous amount of sharing going on. Social media is doing the sort of the same thing. This morning was sad about Zucotti Park, human nature to want to share. My kids are much more aware of how to use the technology. David: the way my kids use “stalker” has become a casual term. Fred: I stalk my kids on FB every day, they know it. Jim: Kids know the difference between public and public/private spaces, they’re much more nuanced about how they approach the world. Fred: we’re doing this hire, looking at all of the social media resources of potential candidates. Next generation is using tools to make “resumes” more interesting.

Kara: If FB is the main stalking platform, what are the main business opportunities? Roger: social is today what “new media” is in 1987. My sense: new environment (half cell phones, half computers) is “hypernet” with totally different economic players. Running out of wireless bandwidth, need to replace infrastructure in cellular. Apple’s position is really unstable, capturing the value through hardware. HTML5 has opportunities to change the rules of the game. Safari gets 100% of development today, but notion of one company capturing all the value needs to change. Gigantic change wave of the hypernet, based on whitespace and digital TV spectrum. Instagram is fun but not important.

Kara to David: Google Plus? Tried to have a quiet debut. “We shipped plus, now we’re shipping the Google.” Two things we want to solve: one is how can we make YouTube, Blogger better by making it more social. Fred: Socialization of Google and mobile apps: eventually they’ll get it right but it’s crazy to think of it as a Facebook killer. Roger: maybe a Twitter killer, because they captured the “twitteratti” early on. Costs zero to add a Plus button. Jim: the big opportunity is what you can do with data. Focus on private data becoming public: more frictionless sharing. Understanding data is hugely disruptive. Use cases, danger is in inappropriate use. How do we use the public data to infer amazing things about each other?

Kara: Are you investing in data companies? Fred: we like to invest in platforms that have a lot of data and can use it to do things natively on the platform. We’re not investing in capturing data for 3rd party things. Kara: How do you look at Twitter? Fred: my favorite platform of all, but not as an investor–I connect to people there (@FredWilson has over 200K followers). It’s all public, everyone knows that.

Roger: two things that Apple did wrong: 1) fight with amazon over one-click, 2) if they get AppleTV right, all they have to do is in-app purchases back. Fire is not a great tablet. Fred: it’s a Kindle with the web on it. Roger: yeah. Nook is much cooler.

Questions.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders
2. PII 2011: Making Privacy Portable
3. PII 2011: Owning Online Identity: Consumer-Managed Data

Lauren: what if your device was stolen? You probably don’t want to notify the thief that the device is being tracked. What’s your threat model? Who’s looking for your data?

Kevin: you have a choice of encrypting data or password resets. There are constraints from many interests that will prevent you from doing what you want. Trust-e is doing some good work.

In mobile space, you have more options of notifying people. Different for platform vendors and mobile developers. For mobile developers, analytics and advertising libraries–the issue is that you’re using user data to determine value. Mobile breaks down in the types of data being collected, not disclosed properly in privacy policy. All SDKs collect lots of info, hashed (sometimes with improper salting, revocation). Inherent architecture in advertising is prone to surveillance-level collection. For example, advertising sometimes passes referrer info to track conversion rates, but is creating a “worse system around” the data. Kevin’s work is trying to make process more transparent.

Each platform makes decisions about how users are going to make decisions about their use of the device. Tremendous liability for companies that misuse customer data. Users are starting to weigh this as a decision point. Compliance is a smaller part of Lauren’s work–there’s a whole lot of unregulated stuff going on. She gives a company a “gut check” on what users would think of these practices, collecting location info and what’s reasonable notice, later translation into a document.

Compliance is not big for startups. The companies that succeed are likely to be those who handle privacy best in any new field.

Questions:

Server location and data protection: different countries treat data variably, what about later when data is valuable? This is a really hard problem, best answer is locate servers in countries with best policies (Kevin Marks suggests Iceland). Have policies that spell out requirements: what you have, retention, is there another alternative to what’s normal procedures, etc. Other extremes: all user data is going into cloud such as Amazon services. This is an adjustment for people. Who holds the key?

New changes to Facebook? It’s a decision to work with them or not. Lauren doesn’t believe that Facebook-like practices will happen again. Using FB Connect is a decision to facilitate user authentication.

What do you think about AWS services, 80 page Terms of Service that allows a very invasive data policy in Amazon’s favor? Lauren: a lot of people are trusting what Amazon’s going to do. I’ve read their TOS and I don’t know what Amazon’s going to do. Important to ask about notice, what kind of policies need to be ported from cloud hosts into your products/services.

Not in this session but related: I Shared What?!? – a service that shows you what information you’re sharing when you use Facebook or FB Connect.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program
2. PII 2011: Making Privacy Portable
3. PII 2011: Startup Spotlight: Disconnect

Kim Howell, (one of) Privacy Directors at Microsoft: When you’re doing a privacy review (practical, intuitive), you need to ask questions. Role playing with Reese as new company seeking a “privacy policy.” First questions (from our table discussions): what does site do, how do they collect info and what do they do with it? What’s their info flow path (is it resold?)? What’s their business model? How do you protect what you’ve collected? Controls by the individual (can visitors remove their data? remediation? transparency?)? Cookies? Other passive data collections? Countries involved (collection, use, storage)?

From Kim: Website: is this a new domain, link to privacy statement? existing privacy statement and does it match/make sure it covers everything? Data collection (see above). Send questions to new site/organization, get information, iterate. More questions: authentication, communication, vendors. Are people creating new accounts? use of email? data access requests? Vendors? Next round of questions: how well does IT + PR + Lawyers work together? Does privacy statement match the service? where’s plausible deniability? Make sure what’s required is clear, what’s optional. Provide better notice about use of information, data retention. Using HTTPS? How easy/obvious is it to obtain informed consent when signing up? Companies often think that writing a privacy statement at the last minute. (Wrong)

Next iteration: What new data is being collected? being sent where? other (new) features coming up? what info is shared? location: is it always being sent, or only in use when app is open? what other info (unique device ID, cell tower info, gender, etc.) is being sent with location data? data retention? If services changes, company may need to re-opt in application users. Privacy controls? (example of circulating the data within different departments of the company, “accounting department loves this data.”) Who needs access? for what use? access to raw data or aggregated statistics? Have data handlers been trained? Unique identifiers are not the only way of identifying a person. What’s intended use of collected data?

Michelle Bruno, Technical Privacy Manager: see printed case study (not online). Focus areas:

1. Level setting: focus on use of customer data, customer expectations, opting out
2. Author guidance: “how to” guides, privacy review checklist, company activities, data sharing, research and betas
3. Position yourself: pro-business privacy message, culture of privacy as a value-add
4. Piggyback: identify existing processes that you can take advantage of: spec templates, guidelines, bug tracking, testing, release management…
5. Analyze and assess: comprehensive data-gathering plan to understand company’s risk
6. Educate: pro-privacy contacts in each group to help succeed, spread work to peers about new process/resources
7. Identify triage partners: incident handling, partnerships in legal, customer support, operations, PR
8. Measure: what are your success metrics?

Questions: tension between user controls and corporate collections? Make sure value matches, is understood by both sides. Look at what business can put in place to allow better user controls. Microsoft has a federated privacy team, Kim’s team defines what compliance looks like.

Not mentioned in this panel but of some related interest (about Terms, not Privacy Policies): TOSAmend and EFF‘s TOSback.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Baking Privacy into the Business
2. PII 2011: Making Privacy Portable
3. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders

Nigel Cameron (President and CEO) notes that the gap between regular corporate culture and policy around emerging tech is large, with disparate cultures.

Jim Dempsey, Center for Democracy and Technology: works on issues affecting the Internet. There are lots of things that DC and Silicon Valley have in common: people come from all over the country, meritocracy, attraction of talent, people who are dedicated and have a vision, rapid response. DC is all about ideas. There is a culture clash among people who should be able to understand each other. DC got it right for initial policy framework for early Internet development. Now it’s under challenge.

Rebecca Lynn, Morgenthaler Ventures: She’s a VC, every company in her portfolio has a unique relationship with DC. About a year and half ago, she realized she needed to know how this all worked (then did so). Convened business competition pitch with entrepreneurs and policy makers.

Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute (started early with nanotech policy): Current (physical) arrangement of lobbyists in DC is “kind of nauseating.” Individual people are approachable. People here needed to learn the system in order to launch a rocket that the military would not shoot down. Genetic information isn’t seen as the people’s.

David Tennenhouse, New Venture Partners: work on spin-outs from corporates, has run the gamut of systems. The key interest in common between Silicon Valley and DC is innovation. DC depends on it for competitiveness, we (SV) live and breathe it. One problem: I do see two levels of engagement: 1) fly in and lobby then fly out (doesn’t do too much for long term), and 2) really influencing the agencies, agendas in an ongoing way. They can’t form agendas without substance from Silicon Valley.

Cameron: mostly wonderful people locked into a dysfunctional corporate culture–working while the ship goes down. Two questions: creative community is represented in DC by a mega technology companies (who represent too much of the past, therefore not inclined to shift the corporate culture). Lynn: Start-ups don’t have time to do this, they need to focus on their interests. Look where the money flows; people are rational actors. Hard for a VC to get behind innovation when the money in DC flows against them. Peterson: large tech companies do some wonderful things and use the word innovation, but the real deep innovation comes from small companies, competitors. Lynn: Salesforce was busy in Congress, it can be daunting to be representing a competing interest. Tennenhouse: Sources for innovation: Universities are largely government funded for research, large corporates start inventions but then spin out, scale things up. Need to make sure the invention parts stay in tact, keep government off backs of innovators. Dempsey: if goal is to promote innovation, it’s not likely to be a big company that will support it and you can’t just get the government out of the way (they facilitate). What are values that promote innovation, the Internet ecosystem? Communities can lobby for these principles.

Questions/Statements: Marcy: There’s a very different value system between policy makers in DC and working landscape in California. Need for startups to band together, need for agile legislation. John Gerard: divide is not cultural, it’s structural. What focuses our energy? Global trademarks (e.g., Facebook pages). Gene Cavanaugh: WIPO has it’s problems but that’s where international trademarks are done. He represents small inventors (lawyer). What he finds is process is contorted: government is only interested in grassroots efforts is if you don’t need the money. If you don’t, the gov will fund you. (Irony alert). Agrees that there’s a structural disconnect: DC gives lots of lip service to innovation but funds top-down. Ernie Te: telecom policy and Continental Divide: systematically saw a government mindset vs entrepreneurial mindset. Government has an illusion of control, decides policy A or B for reality A or B. People in the valley understand there’s more uncertainty, will allow different approaches to be taken. Jacky (SAP): she represents industry bodies in cloud competing, wrote a blog (post) about data crossing borders, job growth globally; there’s an opportunity can enable start-ups.

Lynn: I’m more practical. There are reasons people live in Silicon Valley, the way business is done is different. Need to figure out how DC works. They’re doing things that are more entrepreneurial, but the system is different. Hopefully we can work together. Tennenhouse: Comment about the role of uncertainty in innovation: looking back, development and success are unevenly accomplished. Acknowledging difference in cultures, some agencies (inside beltway, DARPA) should be figuring out how to do it, suggests partnership systems. Peterson: heard this from Peter Theil first: startup companies don’t have to start here, in nanotech, in Sinapore. These decisions are invisible to DC. How to make this more visible. Example: if you give up your US citizenship, you continue to pay taxes for 10 years. Braindrain if we disabled that? Lynn: cross-pollination of cultures. Bring people out here to help with translation. Dempsey: everybody is looking for failure? Unacceptable to say that 50% of R&D investments will fail. How to turn this around, make it work? Point is that failure is a successful strategy: try things that might not work is a definition of success (a Silicon Valley perspective). Think comprehensively, act incrementally. Cautiousness, conservativeness, unwillingness to try new things is a problem (DC). Cameron: it’s all about corporate culture. There are things that could be done. Get these guys (DC) to come to conferences here, get the thinking into their bloodstreams. It’s not so much about technology or process, but in DC all conversations are about debt. Look at what the questions are. We need to reshape what questions are being asked.

More »

Related posts:

1. PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program
2. PII 2011: Baking Privacy into the Business
3. PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders

Joe offered a quick intro to Information Sharing Agreements. The point of Information Sharing Agreements is to improve services for both individuals and organizations through the right data and the right time. Services need data to operate.  Personal data is the most relevant, timely and quality data. This is what individuals bring to the table.

• Criteria. Preferences. Requirements. Queries and Intention
• Relationships and memberships
• Age, Address and billing information
• History: transactions and interactions.

Together, all of this comprises the digital context that people bring to their online experience.

If organizations can access this context, they can provide a bunch of interesting services and improve existing services.

• Search, recommendations, and discoveries.
• Personal RFPs and Shopping
• Discounts, Promotions, Special offers
• Reviews and Endorsements
• Socializing and Sharing
• Geolocation and Self-Tracking
• Analytics and Dashboards
• Customer and Technical Support and Service Management

The problem is that there are significant barriers between services and data

• Privacy issues, Liabilities, and Regulations
• Problems with Accuracy,
• Isolated information that is simply unreachable in some offline form,
• Unstated data trapped in our head
• And for ethical companies, consent

If we can overcome these barriers, we can unlock significant value for both individuals and organizations. We can personalize services, respond to demand, and even drive product development based on explicit signals of intention in the marketplace. The data is higher quality, more timely and more relevant than proprietary or third party data–resulting in more intimacy and unobtrusive, streamlined interactions. The ends result is higher margins, greater responsiveness, more profit and greater satisfaction.

So how do we do it?

• We construct a contract governing use before sharing occurs
• We do that through a trust framework
• With legally defined roles that any certified entity can play.
• And the point of the trust framework is solely to govern the use of shared information.

Our approach is essentially a two part contract between individuals and data recipients. First, a master agreement that defines the roles in the framework and the default terms, such as when it is and isn’t sharable with third parties. Second, a data transfer agreement that covers a specific instance of sharing.

First, parties enter into a master agreement prior to engaging with the framework. Then, during their web workflow, both parties construct a mutually favorable data transfer agreement covering information shared just prior to sharing.

Here’s a picture of the overall architecture, showing a particular data exchange.  (slides to come)

We have our individual and the data recipient. Prior to this transaction, both the individual and the recipient have signed one or more master agreements, which are registered at a signature authority. In return, those authorities provide both parties with identities suitable for signing data transfer agreements.
This is a typical web-based transaction. The data recipient has published signed offer, requesting specific data for a specific use, under one or more master agreements. If the individual has signed a matching master agreement, they can accept the offer by selecting any optional terms, signing their response and sending it to the recipient. Now, the data can be transferred with clear purpose-binding between that data and those terms.

That’s a typical transaction. In fact, most transactions will occur without the individual needing to even view the specific agreement. The client automatically records the agreements, accepting the default terms.

But if the consumer wants to review the terms or change from the default, they can view them in a standard format we call an Information Sharing Label, based on the Nutrition Facts label on packaged foods in the US. It contains just the details required to make an informed decision. And because we’ve put all the default terms in the master agreement, the details are a complete, user-friendly presentation of all the terms of that Data Transaction Agreement.

Consider Google operating under with Information Sharing Agreements. Most of the time, the software seamlessly records the agreement, accepting the default terms. So, Google search looks and feels pretty much just like it is today.

But if you view the label, it might look something like this:

The recipient is Google. They are getting search queries entered into the search box on the web page, they get them upon submission. The purpose is to recommend websites (which covers both organic results and ads). That particular use only uses the data for the time it takes to generate the search results and the output for that service is the web page resulting from the submission.
Google also requests the ability to retain that data for statistical aggregation (the output of which they will be permitted to re-use for other services).

The master agreement is the 2011 Standard Information Sharing Master Agreement and it will be stored locally (presumably by a browser plugin of some kind). This could just as easily be a service provider in the cloud, such as Personal.com or Connect.me.
Finally, the client software pulls in ratings from user-selected rating services, which are free rate the data recipient on any criteria.  Privacy, trust, security, consumer satisfaction, whatever.
The Signature Authority, the Rating Services, and the Assessors are all certified according to ISWG criteria by assessors.

So what does this mean for individuals?

Let’s look at Sally (our user engagement model), a newlywed looking for a new car. She uses her Personal Data Store to collect her shopping activity and research, with notes and captures from car dealers, manufacturers, reviews, articles, and even the Department of Transportation’s safety test results. She also gets a certified proof of available financing from her Credit Union.

When she’s ready to find a dealer, she permissions her research through a simple click of the mouse, to “MyPal” who acts on her behalf to publish a personal Request for Proposal. Sally confirms the suggestions made by MyPal and specifies the timing and terms as well as the way she wants MyPal to communicate with her during the process.

Chryota of London responds to that proposal, through MyPal. Chryota knows that Sally is a qualified buyer, not only because she’s done a lot of research, but she’s also paid a small fee MyPal to manage the pRFP and has pre-arranged financing. As a result, Chryota flags her pRFP as priority. A trained sales consultant checks inventory against Sally’s request, asks a few follow up questions and responds with a firm bid that meets her needs at a competitive price. Sally buys the car and the dealer uses her personal data store to auto-fill the typical paperwork, from title transfer and financing to congestion fees and insurance.

All of these data transfers are fully documented and covered by explicit Information Sharing Agreements. Sally got better, faster service and a great price. The vendor got a qualified, prepared customer, a relatively fast sale, and the beginning of a rich relationship with a new customer. Everyone can rest assured that the information is free from unexpected liabilities.

Everyone benefitted from the right data at the right time.

UPDATE: here’s the link to the Prezi presentation that went with this talk.

More »

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1. IIW XIII: Sneaky Bastards
2. IIW XIII: Personal Data Ecosystem Overview
3. IIW XIII: PDEC’s Legal Advisory Board