Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures, the cliche “level playing field” eventually surfaces. When regulators finally get around to thinking about what happens in the online world, especially in the area of personal data, then they will have to come to terms with the fact that the playing field is not just tilted in favour of the online giants, but is as vertical as that rockface in Yosemite that two Americans have finally managed to free climb.

The mechanism for rotating the playing field is our old friend, the terms and conditions agreement, usually called the “end user licence agreement” (EULA) in cyberspace. This invariably consists of three coats of prime legal verbiage distributed over 32 pages, which basically comes down to this: “If you want to do business with us, then you will do it entirely on our terms; click here to agree, otherwise go screw yourself. Oh, and by the way, all of your personal data revealed in your interactions with us belongs to us.”

The strange thing is that this formula applies regardless of whether you are actually trying to purchase something from the author of the EULA or merely trying to avail yourself of its “free” services.

When the history of this period comes to be written, our great-grandchildren will marvel at the fact that billions of apparently sane individuals passively accepted this grotesquely asymmetrical deal. (They may also wonder why our governments have shown so little interest in the matter.) And future historians, diligently hunting through digital archives, will discover that there were only a few voices crying in the wilderness at the time.

Of these prophets, the most prominent are Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who was one of the pioneers of virtual reality, and Doc Searls, one of the elder statesman of the old internet who is now at the Berkman Centre at Harvard. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier argued that by convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for “free” services, firms such as Google and Facebook have accumulated colossal amounts of data (and corresponding amounts of wealth) at virtually no cost. His proposed solution is to make online transactions bidirectional, to ensure that the economic value of personal data can be realised by individuals, who at the moment just give it away.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier; Big Data by Victor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier – review Read more

Doc Searls has much the same argument in his book The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge but proposes a different kind of software solution – “vendor relationship management”. The basic idea is that “many market problems (including the widespread belief that customer lock-in is a ‘best practice’) can only be solved from the customer side: by making the customer a fully empowered actor in the market place, rather than one whose power in many cases is dependent on exclusive relationships with vendors, by coerced agreement provided entirely by those vendors”. In that sense, just as most big companies now use “customer relationship management” systems to manage their interactions with users, Searls thinks that customers need systems that can manage their interactions with companies, but on customers’ terms.

The underlying philosophy underpinning all attempts to level the online playing field is a belief that an individual’s data belongs to him or herself and that no one should have access to it except on terms that are controlled by the data owner. The hunt is on, therefore, for technologies (software and/or hardware) that would make this both possible and be easy to use. An interesting idea of how to do that surfaced last week in a paper by computer scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Cambridge University.

The basic concept is a Databox, a piece of software that collects personal data and then manages how that information is made available to third parties. In essence, it’s “a networked service that collates personal information from all of your devices and can also make that data available to organisations that the owner allows”.

And although the Databox is conceived of as a virtual platform, in that it involves multiple devices and services, at least one instance of it will exist in a physical form, for example as a small box that also functions as a home hub.

Getting from here to a service that is usable by normal human beings will, no doubt, be a long and winding road. Among the problems to be solved are thorny issues of trust, security and user-friendliness. But, like Lanier and Searls, the Databox project researchers are on the right track. As the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This is it.

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