honestlyreal

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On the shifting of control of personal data

If you’ve been locked in a cupboard for the last five (or more) years, you’re excused from observing this thematic shift:

In the longer term, data about people is more likely to be owned and controlled by them. Rather than having many instances of personal information scattered around organisations and agencies, to be confused, duplicated, corrupted and left on buses, simpler technologies have emerged to put the data owner, you, back in control.

We see this theme emerging with several different labels: from vendor relationship management, to volunteered personal information, to personal datastores, to a “control shift” in the concept of personal data.

I agree that this shift is inevitable, to a greater or lesser extent. Everyone wants it. What’s not to like? Less cost of processing, greater security, reinforcement of personal rights etc. etc.

We start to make the ideologically satisfying separation of identification and authentication/entitlement more of a reality. More of this in other posts.

I just have two snagging issues which I’d love to hear a response on from those who want to get us moving on this now:

The first is a transitional one, but an important one. As the group of “personal data holders” grows, the infrastructure and operations required to support the other group won’t change. There’ll be a double running of systems. Although this is inevitable with any system change, it puts an immediate disincentive on any service provider to explore this route. (But this is not my point here.)

My point is that strange things will start to happen in terms of operational continuity and completeness. There will be “gaps” in databases, where the personal data holders used to be. Instead of their information, there will be links and interfaces to the data they control for themselves. Will this create all sorts of headaches and risks just by itself? Enough to seriously dampen any service provider’s enthusiasm for adopting volunteered personal information?

The second will persist, and is perhaps more problematic. Because your personal information (whether it’s about your identity, other descriptive information about you, or about your authorisation to a particular service) is going to have to be assured by someone. This may not, and indeed should not–in the case of identity–be the exclusive province of government agencies, but someone is going to have to do it.

Some will do it well: banks, for example, are rather more incentivised (and skilled as a result) to be damn sure you are who you claim to be. But some won’t. And when we get down to the level of a patchwork of assurers, in any system, we start to get some problems. When things go wrong (and they will)–have a vision of a functional world by all means, but build for the real, dysfunctional one–the untangling of liability may consume more resource than was ever achieved by enabling the shift of control in the first place?

Thoughts? I’d love to be convinced. I really would. But I’m a healthy skeptic at the moment.