On Apr 14, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Katherine Warman Kern wrote:
> I want a better third party that serves one master and has no conflict of interest, making more regulation less urgent, and shifting corporate dollars from paying lobbyists to serving
> me better.
I suggest that would be a fourth party.
Agreed. We can argue about the term "fourth party", but the underlying point is alignment of interests. In real estate, a
buyer's agent is called a buyer's agent because they enter into a contract with you, the purchaser, to represent your interests and not the seller. In the U.S. laws actually changed to enable this. From the Wikipedia article: "It is only since the early 1990s that states passed
statute law to create buyers' agency."
The same is true in credit card networks. The cardholder bank has (some) requirements to protect the cardholder's interests. For example, if you want to dispute a credit card charge, and you can't get relief from the merchant (because your interests and the merchant's interests are not aligned), you don't call the merchant's bank (because their interests are aligned with the merchant), you call your cardholder bank. They are is required by their credit card network membership agreement to assist you in disputing the charge. The merchant's bank is not.
That's what "alignment of interests" means. Again, even in credit card networks, this ends out being embodied in legal agreements backed by legislation. For example, the U.S. Fair Credit Billing Act limits credit card fraud liability to $50 -- and the forebearer to that legislation is widely credited with helping credit cards break out into ubiquity.
Thus, IMHO, the real opportunity is for a new breed of legal agreement that supports this alignment of interests between an individual and a party (give them whatever number you want) that provides services aligned with the individual's interest in capturing and protecting the value of her personal data. And potentially for new legislation that further enables this new breed of legal agreements.
The Kantara Information Sharing Working Group is working on such an agreement. So is Connect.Me in the form of a trust framework for personal data (we've been blogging about it at
http://blog.connect.me). There was a session on trust frameworks for personal data the Personal Data 2.0 Workshop as part of Telco 2.0 in Palo Alto last week.
So it's finally happening. We're going to see if this particular breed of VRM dog hunts ;-)
=Drummond