Equals Drummond

Joe Andrieu has a wonderful way of cutting the Gordian knot on complex socio-technical topics, with clear prose, compelling arguments, and clever illustrations that explain why you should look at something decidedly differently.

Now he wields that knife on the very knotty “problem” of data ownership.

I passionately agree with Joe (and his Kantara Working Group co-chair Iain Henderson) on this subject; I suspect it’s because my perspective on it was long ago warped by the lens of XDI, which itself is a new way of thinking about data.

Turn the telescope to look at personal data from the standpoint of who controls its  sharing with whom, and many pieces finally come into focus.

Keep that in mind as we move into an XDI-enabled world.

Doc Searls has done a very succinct post on the Principles of VRM in preparation for the VRM Workshop next week in Boston. You can’t read it and not see how closely VRM is related to r-cards (relationship cards) and XDI. I’m so excited to actually start bringing this to market this year that sometimes I want to drop everything else (standards calls, conferences, email, expense reports, EVERYTHING) and just work on that ’till its out the door.

Like the Web itself, the Web of Relationships — the whole Web becoming a social network — will change the world in ways we can hardly begin to imagine.

So much for the naive thought that I’ have time at the Burton Catalyst conference last week to finally blog about two subjects near and dear to my heart that I knew would be covered at the conference. It backfired because they were too topical — all available time was consumed by related conversations.

I did manage two posts about the first one — launch of the Information Card Foundation — about which there will be much more to say in the coming months.

But the other one — relationship cards — is long overdue. I first promised to blog more about r-cards after both doing a demo and hearing Bob Blakley’s fantastic talk on The Relationship Layer at Spring IIW in May. Then Joe Andrieu and Eve Maler both posted about them and asked me to add more details. Then I fell into an abyss of work (actually building this stuff) from which I have yet to climb out.

But Bob’s new talk on The Relationship Layer at Catalyst last week, followed by Eve’s talk on The Care and Feeding of Online Relationships, plus the upcoming VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Workshop at the Harvard Berkman Project on July 14-15, compels me to finally post about why I believe r-cards may be what finally pushes Internet identity across the chasm.

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First: what is a relationship card (”r-card”)? At the most general, the definition I would offer is:  “a digital object instantiating a mutually authorized data sharing relationship between two or more parties on a network”. The abstraction is intentional: the generic concept of an r-card, like the generic concept of a folder, a link, or a network, can take different forms in different implementations.

To take a step more towards the concrete, the concept of an r-card was conceived at the Higgins Project as a new kind of information card (i-card). For their part, i-cards were first conceived by Kim Cameron and team at Microsoft, where they have been promoted as a key element of Microsoft’s vision of an identity metasystem. These memes subsequently took hold at Higgins, among other places, where the concept of an i-card was generalized to the definition that currently appears on Wikipedia:

An i-card is a rectangular icon displayed in the user interface of an identity selector (sometimes also called an identity agent) that represents a digital identity–a set of claims about some entity (typically a person, but it could also be an organization, application, service, digital object, etc.).

The i-card metaphor is based on familiar physical identity credentials like business cards, credit cards, library cards, association cards, driver’s licenses, badges, etc. However, just as computer file folders are similar to but more powerful than real-world file folders, i-cards are similar to but more powerful than real-world identification cards. The i-card metaphor is identical to the information card metaphor used in numerous identity selectors.

So what distinguishes an r-card from a plain-vanilla i-card? The capability to instantiate an ongoing data sharing relationship. In other words, a standard i-card invokes a one-time exchange of a set of digital claims using a security token. An r-card, by contrast, exchanges a set of claims and associated policies that enables both parties to continue to share other information over time, e.g.:

• Updates to the initial values of the claims
• New claims
• Permissions and controls over communications via other channels
• Changes to the r-card itself

A simple analogy would be: a standard i-card is like showing your driver’s license to a bartender to prove you are of age: you use it once and put it away. An r-card is much more like giving a business card to an associate or a customer: it is an invitation for an ongoing relationship via the address(es) and other information shared on the card.

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But while instantiating a private data sharing channel by exchanging a digital object is cool — sort of like RSS on steriods — for some reason that aspect alone doesn’t capture the real power of r-cards. Case in point: after a live participatory enactment of how r-cards work with audience members during the first day of IIW in May (all based on business cards, scissors, and string — no computers involved), several audience members came up to me and said, “Why didn’t you show this years ago? Anyone can understand the value of r-cards. They are the most compelling use case we’ve ever heard for all this Internet identity stuff.”

After that experience, even I was trying to grok what it was that made r-cards so intuitive and attractive. I was having trouble putting it into words until I was listening to Bob Blakley’s talk on The Relationship Layer again at Catalyst last Wednesday morning. At the midway point, he put up an “intermission” slide with five bullets summarizing the first half of his talk. Two of them hit me like they were shot out of a gun:

Relationship is the context which protects the security and the privacy of identity information.

Identities are built in the context of relationships.

This Copernican revolution Bob was proposing — that relationship is really the sun around which identities orbit — suddenly made me look at r-cards in a new way. It wasn’t just that r-cards enabled bidirectional data sharing. It was that r-cards create the context for a relationship. And by doing so, they call forth all social dynamics of real world relationships that are often missing on the Web today. Dynamics like:

“I am more inclined to trust you because we both know if you break that trust, I can terminate the relationship.”

“Of course you wouldn’t share our private shared information outside our relationship — friends always respect each other’s privacy.”

“Each of us shares information in proportion to the value it brings to the relationship — both of us are incented to build that value.”

That’s why people find r-cards so intuitive — they are a way of creating and managing the same balanced, mutually-controlled, give-and-take between two parties over a network that we have in the real world relationships we manage every day. And they can apply to any form of relationship — person-to-person, person-to-community, person-to-employer, person-to-vendor, etc.

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Okay, okay, at this point I know all the geeks are screaming “enough with the soft stuff — where’’s the technical beef??” I don’t want to duck that question, because as I’ve told Joe Andrieu, chair of the VRM Standards group, I’m knee-deep in it every day. But with the limited time I have left for this post, I can only give the high-level recipe we are currently putting to the oven test at Parity and the Higgins Project:

• Take a conventional i-card as currently defined by the Microsoft ISIP documents (which can’t get into an SDO fast enough).
• Add an OpenID — or to be precise, an identifier on which you can do XRDS discovery to locate a data sharing endpoint. In Higgins we call this form of identifier a UDI (Universal Data Identifier).
• When the r-card recipient receives the r-card, use the UDI to perform XRDS discovery of an Internet data sharing protocol supported by both parties.
• Intiatite data sharing via the selected protocol, using the UDI and other supporting claims on the r-card as necessary.

Of course readers of this blog know what data sharing protocol I have in mind: XDI — specifically the XDI RDF model. It’s particularly well-suited to r-cards because XDI link contracts provide a portable, machine-readable description of the mutually-agreed data sharing controls. But it’s important to clarify that any data sharing protocol supported by both parties will work. As an example, Asa Hardcastle showed a wonderful demo of OpenID-enabled Liberty ID-WSF at Spring IIW, and we are deep in conversations about how UDI discovery for ID-WSF endpoints can work. OpenID Attribute Exchange is another option because any OpenID identifier can already support XRDS service discovery.

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I know that’s only the tip of the iceburg, but this is a huge topic that I’ll be posting about for months. For example, in Bob’s talk he showed a relationship schema that he, Lori Rowland, and their colleagues at Burton group have already started to develop. I eagerly anticipate working with them to map that to XDI link contracts to make sure we have all the bases covered.

And I’d like to find time to start posting some example r-card XDI messages using super-simple X3 format to illustrate common use cases like the VRM personal address manager.

But right now I’m going to work on maintaining a particularly important relationship — with my wife — by getting to bed!

Denise Caruso published a wonderful article in Sunday’s New York Times on a subject very close to my heart: how to best go about protecting personal identity, profile, and preference data as new technologies like OpenID, Higgins, and XDI make it possible for individuals to aggregate and share this information much more easily. Call it the “new power of personality” – digital personality.

One of the most intriguing ideas Denise covers in the article is one from Mike Neuenschwander, Lori Rowland, Bob Blakely, Jamie Lewis, and their colleagues at the Burton Group. They propose the idea of a new legal entity explicitly for protection of personal identity data: the Limited Liability Persona (LLP, a nice play on the Limited Liability Partnership). Given the amount of time I’ve spent at the intersection of law and technology and personal data, I’m increasingly believing that the Burton Group is right – digital personas will be granted their own status as a legal construct, just as corporations, patnerships, and sole proprietorships have been in many jurisdictions. I blogged about the LLP when I first heard Jamie Lewis speak about it at Digital ID World 2006, and I think it’s time may be coming. I’m adding it as a category on this blog, and I’ll make it a point to keep reporting on it as it develops.

Last week I mentioned the Social Web User’s Bill of Rights that was drafted for the Data Sharing Summit last Friday and Saturday. When it was first posted, it included the phrase, “ownership”, as in “user’s should own their personal data”.

Mary Hodder, the entrepreneur behind Dabble.com, Paul Trevithick, and I were initially wary of using this term for two reasons:

• “Ownership” is very tricky legal territory, not just in the U.S. but all over the world. Personally I believe the term “identity rights” and “identity rights agreements” is actually more appropriate (see more below).
• Mary made the point that it’s really “co-ownership”, i.e., when users share data with sites, it’s for the benefit of both, and sites need to know they can use the data to provide the services they are giving the user.

However in a blog post today, Mary said that after conversations at the Data Sharing Summit, and then with others in the industry and Dabble advisors, she became convinced that the spirit of “ownership” is correct, and so she’s endorsing the Bill of Rights and adjusting the Dabble TOS (Terms of Service) to reflect this concept of user ownership of their data.

Good for her. I fully agree that the spirit is right, and so, with the caveats I expressed above, I’m on board too. So is Doc Searls in a post he just made.

Interestingly, the very last session at the Data Sharing Summit (in fact, after the closing circle – that’s how dedicated the attendees were) was on Identity Rights Agreements (IRAs), a Working Group formed at Identity Commons in the spring of 2006. The whole idea of IRAs is that users actually license their data to sites, and that if the IRA Working Group could come up with a small set of easily understood user data licensing provisions, similar (but not identical to) the Creative Commons license suite for digital works, it could usher in a whole new era of increased trust between users and sites.

Victor Grey called the IRAs session because he’s doing XRI-based data sharing projects where he needs IRAs today, and he wants the IRAs Working Group to start publishing even very simple ones just to get the learning started (Creative Commons licenses all went through several revisions too).

The outcome of the session was to jumpstart the work of the IRAs Working Group. Victor has already set up the mailing list. Please do join us if you support this work and want to help.

I believe IRAs have the potential to remove the last social hurdle to standardized user-controlled personal data sharing (XDI removes the last technical hurdles). I intend to be very active on the IRAs Working Group (as badly time-sliced as I am these days) so that we can make user ownership of personal data not just laudable but actionable.

Certain events scream out for live blogging. The Data Sharing Summit is one of them. So these are my notes from first half of Day 1. (Then why are they being posted at midnight, you ask? Because there was too damn much to talk about during the second half of the day. More on that tomorrow.)

First, this is the list of problems that attendees want to see addressed:

• The distributed schema mapping problem – how do you map across zillions of different local schemas?
• The “Social Web Bill of Rights” or “identity rights agreement” problem – how can you have “Creative Commons licenses for data sharing”?
• The protocol problem – how do you move social graph data around?
• The “too many IDs” problem – how can we not require more IDs (even with OpenID there is starting to be a proliferation of IDs)?
• The directory or “friend discovery” problem – how do you find other people in the social graph (a “People’s Guidestar”)?
• The addressing problem – how can data be addressed in a consistent manner across distributed locations?
• The user privacy and control problem (also called the “fear” or “surprise” problem) – how can users not be spooked by the idea of their social graph data “getting loose”; how can they maintain control over portable social graph data?
• The granular access control problem – how can control be easily brought down to the individual attribute level, e.g., date of birth?
• The regulation problem – how can social graph portability be accomplished within the bounds of data sharing regulations that currently do not permit certain types of personal data to be shared across certain jurisdictions?
• The safety problem – how can portable social graphs not be subject to the same spam, phishing, and phraud problems as email and the Web?
• The political problem – how can we make it “politically necessary” for sites and applications to offer social network graph export?
• The “friend description problem” – how can we have a interoperable means of providing richer description of “friend” relationships?
• The calendar sharing problem – of all the different types of social graph data, how specifically can we reach alignment over sharing of calendar data?
• The adoption problem – what are the compelling uses of social graph portability that will drive large-scale adoption?
• The internationalization problem – how can attribute sharing work across all world languages?
• The user experience problem – how can social graph sharing operations be made simple and understandable to everyday Web users?
• The operational problem – how will large-scale data sharing affect network loads, caching, firewalls, security perimeters, etc.?
• The “invitation fatigue” problem – how can we stop being overwhelmed by yet another source of messages and “click-to-accept” links?

Second, this is the list of solutions being offered at the DSS:

• An OpenID interoperability testing service (Marc Canter)
• A new open source project & community for social data portability using Higgins and Higgins context providers.
• A community dictionary service for schema mapping (Markus Sabadello, Drummond Reed, Paul Trevithick)
• Different companies offering the potential to have open APIs for sharing their social graph data (AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Google, Cyworld).
• OpenID-based attribute exchange (Dick Hardt & Sxip)
• An open API format for social network portability and sync’ing (Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon)
• A social network export service (Upscoop from Rapleaf)

Third, here are the demos that were shown before lunch:

• Cloudtripper: Paul Trevithick and Markus Sabadello showed how Higgins in conjunction with Higgins context providers (code chunks that know how to talk to specific data sources) can be used to pull a user’s social graph data together directly to their own desktop client.
• Community Dictionary Service (CDS): Markus Sabadello and I demo’d a new service contributed to the Identity Schemas Working Group at Identity Commons. Intended to help solve the schema mapping problem for highly distributed data sharing, the CDS is a “Wikipedia for machines” – a way for applications to discover and map elements from different data schemas. (I’ll blog a bunch more about this after the Summit is over, but please do see it for yourself.)
• FOAF crawler: David Recordon (now back at Six Apart) showed a service that crawls public FOAF, XFN, or other relationship metadata to produce aggregated social graphs.
• Pownce: Leah Culver demo’d a social network aggregation service that lets users aggregate their own social graph.
• XRI-based data sharing: Mike Mell showed an implementation of a data sharing solution based on XRI structured identifiers for La Leche League International.

Many of us in Internet identity like to joke about how we all work for Doc Searls, since he’s the one who initiated the Identity Gang and the whole current movement towards user-centric identity. But we may all seriously end up working for Doc in the new industry he’s setting out to create: VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). You can get a feel for it from the VRM wiki at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and there’s already a serious set of bloggers explaining how it will be the next big thing.

All I can say is: VROOOM! We can’t get to the starting line fast enough. As powerful as you think this idea might be, wait until the rubber meets the road and VRM services and solutions start hitting the market. It’s going be a tangible example of what Kim Cameron calls the “identity Big Bang”.
Like the Cluetrain Manifesto, I don’t think anything short of crawling inside Doc’s brain can really explain how much VRM will change marketing and CRM as we know it. But I plan to do everything I can to help, and with luck that will be plenty, because this is EXACTLY the kind of application for which XRI/XDI infrastructure was conceived.

I’ve added VRM as a category to my blog, and plan to attend Doc’s VRM development workshop before his Mobile Identity unconference at the end of January, so watch for more stories on it as the New Year unfolds.

In Jamie Lewis’s talk at Digital ID World this morning, one idea stood out as a real mind-bender: the Limited Liability Persona (LLP). Jamie was careful to give credit to several folks from the Burton Group who came up with this idea: Mike Neuenschwander & Lori Rowland. I captured the high-level bullets from Jamie’s slide on this concept:

• Individuals can have multiple LLPs, each for different modes, roles
• Compromised LLPs can be shed under certain circumstances
• Could even be sold, like an online game idenity
• But LLPs don’t absolve us of civic responsibility, criminal liability
• Reputation damage, other consequences much like the physical world
• Legal symmetry between all parties

This is a fascinating new idea that gibes very closely with the emerging new industry of i-brokers. I’m going to give this one a deep think.

UPDATE 2008-01-04: Jaco Aizenmann, XDI.org trustee from Costa Rica and founder of VirtualRights.org, has in fact been advancing the concept of a legal “virtual personality” (the best English translation of the Spanish term for “digital identity”) for years now. He has been a passionate advocate since I first met him in 2003 that virtual personality should be a full-fledged legal entity at the same level as a corporation, LLC, sole proprietorship, etc. He helped pioneer the concept in Costa Rica and organized the Virtual Personality forum held at the Costa Rican Congress, 10 May 2005. To my knowledge Costa Rica is the first country considering a constitutional amendment to recognize virtual personality/digital identity as a first class legal entity. You can read more about the legal concept on the virtual personality page at Identity Commons. I look forward to more updates on this from Jaco.

I just got back from Internet Identity Workshop 2006A (the “A” because a second one is planned later this year). I want to echo the praises others (Phil Windley, Kim Cameron) have heaped on it. In particular, Kaliya was amazing. You want to do an unconference? She’s the one to call. The whole unconference format showed just how effective it can be to let a motivated audience self-organize.

Following are a few highlights from the sessions which I was able to attend (my only complaint was that there were so many I couldn’t attend ’cause there just wasn’t enough time!)

• The i-tags session, wonderfully blogged by Christine Herron, produced some excellent ideas and feedback about the third draft spec. Ben Laurie had some great suggestions too. It’s finally time to ramp up a mailing list, which we’ll be doing shortly.
• The identity rights agreements session, which I’d been anticipating for several months now, was every bit as fascinating as I thought it would be. Again, see Christine’s post for a summary. The biggest frustration was that after an hour and fifteen minutes we were just really getting started – we needed a good half-day on the subject. But we agreed to begin moving the work forward on the Identity Rights wiki and mailing list. I’m also planning another blog post inspired by the final part of the discussion.
• Dale Olds of Novell led an eye-opening session on all the open source projects related to digital identity. See this blog post by Phil for more info.
• Phil did a great session on the reputation system he and his BYU students have created. It shows just how difficult reputation can be — and how valuable if we get it right.
• The XRI and SAML Single Sign-On (ISSO) session given by Peter Davis produced excellent feedback on the draft spec (to be posted on the XDI.org wiki as soon as Peter can deal with some formatting issues) from such SAML experts as Bob Morgan, Eve Maler, Jeff Hodges, and Nick Ragouzis.
• A testiment to just how densely packed the sessions were was the fact that I missed the session on Identity Commons 2.0! But reports from those who made it are that the ball moved further forward and the necessary organizational steps are already underway.
• The final highlight — which we couldn’t even squeeze in until after the conference was over — was being able to get in front of a whiteboard with Paul Trevithick and Andy Dale and produce a picture of how Higgins and XDI fit together (captured by Phil when he and Doc and Kaliya joined us). The conclusions we reached were a real eye-opener, one for which I’m going to do a separate post to do it justice.

Net net: as Phil Becker summed up in the Digital ID World newsletter (as quoted by Kim):

“…it was, in my opinion, a tremendously significant moment in the evolution of the identity conversation, and one that will have many significant ramifications going forward – though these will likely take another year to become clear to those not paying close attention.”

Paul Madsen makes another very good point about identity rights agreements (hmm, the acronym is going to end up “IRA”):

This work would be really interesting & valuable. Identity agreements and their identifiers could be common across particular identity systems (e.g. Liberty, Shib, OpenID, LID, SXIP, WS-*, etc) and so serve as a key piece of any metasystem that underlies or unites such systems.

Paul also points out (as has Peter Davis to me in an email) that…

Liberty ID-WSF has a container in our protocols for carrying such identifiers (an empty container because, as yet, we have not ourselves defined any policy syntax or identifiers – despite some early work along this route).

I believe it would be ideal for Identity Commons to work with Liberty Alliance and all the Identity Gang participants to define this vital new piece of the identity metasystem. I continue to have the feeling it may just be the fuse on Kim Cameron’s “identity big bang“.

The term “identity rights agreements” was coined by Phil Windley, Doc Searls, and friends in a discussion about identity after OSCON last summer. The full story is in a blog post with that title by Phil.

At the Internet Identity Workshop last October, we held an open space session by that name because a number of Identity Gang folks have been talking about the general concept for several years now. In particular, from an XRI/XDI perspective, identity rights agreements fit perfectly with the concept of data sharing controls embodied in link contracts.

Now the idea is moving from concept to reality. Identity rights agreements are becoming one of the galvanizing forces for a revitalized Identity Commons. One of the reasons is the oft-used analogy that “Identity Commons should be to identity rights what Creative Commons is to copyright”.

I want to take a moment to explain why I believe this analogy may be so profound — and thus why identity rights agreements may become one of the hottest topics in digital identity.

The trigger for these thoughts was Bob Blakely’s post On the Absurdity of Owning One’s Identity, in which he makes an argument why Kim Cameron’s First Law of Identity is, to use another legal term, “unenforceable”. While I think Bob makes a number of strong points in his post (and illustrates them with fascinating, richly researched examples — who says the art of the essay is dead?), I ultimately disagree with his conclusion only because I think he misinterprets the importance of the first word of the First Law:

Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent.

In other words, although much of what Bob says is true, only it applies to the people and businesses that operate identity systems and collect/disseminate identity data, not to the technical systems themselves, which is what I believe Kim meant the First Law to apply to.

But that’s a different subject. What really struck me about Bob’s essay was the knock-down-brilliant points he makes about the fundamental privacy concept of “consent”. To quote his introduction to this topic:

Consent

Negotiating the terms on which you will disclose self-image information is what Consent is all about.
In many cases there are laws and regulations constraining what an organization can do with information it collects about you in situations like this, but you don’t control the content of those laws and regulations – so you’re not making the rules (and in fact the interests of society and the interests of corporations influence the content of laws and regulations at least as strongly as the interests of individuals).

If you want to control your identity based on consent, you have to decide between two approaches:

1. Build one set of terms which covers all uses of your information, and let an automated system take care of negotiating your terms and enforcing your rules. In this case, you need to figure out in advance what all the possible scenarios for use of your identity are, and write a policy which covers each scenario.
2. Negotiate terms manually each time someone asks for your information. In this case, you need to get notified each time someone tries to use your identity, and make a decision about whether or not to grant consent.

Case 1 clearly isn’t going to work all the time; you can’t know in advance what benefits are going to be offered in exchange for identity information, and you can’t know in advance what risks are going to be created by giving that information out – so no matter what your policy is, there will always be cases it doesn’t handle correctly. This means there will be lots of exceptions to your policy, and when these exceptions arise you’ll have to fall back on case 2.

Case 2 doesn’t really work either. We know because we’ve tried it. Look here, or here, or here, or here for examples of what you’re already being asked to consent to. How well do you understand these terms? How likely are you to take the time to clear up the things you’re not sure about? How likely are you to say “no”?

Bob then goes on to explain that there are three forces behind his assessment of the problems with consent:

The forces at work here are obscurity, coercion, and burdens.

I encourage anyone who’s interested in this topic to read Bob’s arguments in great detail. But the one I want to highlight here is:

Because Identity Allocates Risk, society makes rules to make sure Identity is used fairly. Two typical rules are (1) someone who wants to use your information has to tell you what it will be used for (”notice”), and (2) someone who wants to use your information in a way that might create risks for you has to get your permission (”consent”). You have to pay close attention here: the rules don’t say that businesses and other parties can’t create risks for you – all the rules say is that other parties have to tell you when they create risks for you, and they have to get you to agree to the creation of the risks.

These rules create obscurity, because in business, the language of risk is law. The bank makes lots of loans, and therefore it is exposed to lots of risk. Because it’s exposed to lots of risk, the bank is willing to spend some money to protect itself against that risk. It spends that money on people who speak the language of risk – lawyers – and those lawyers write consent agreements that let the business do what it needs to do profitably (in this case, it needs to create risks for you by using your identity information) without breaking the rules.

You probably aren’t a lawyer, so the language in which consent agreements are written is foreign, and confusing, to you. On the other hand, you don’t value your privacy enough to hire your own lawyer each time you encounter a consent disclosure – so you end up doing something (reading a complicated legal agreement which allocates risks between you and the corporation) which you’re not really qualified to do, and it’s confusing and frustrating (Don Davis calls this kind of situation a “compliance defect“).

Bingo! Now, if you haven’t done so already, go here right now and read Phil’s very simple and intuitive description of the purpose of an identity rights agreement.

The two fit together like hand and glove. What identity rights agreements could solve — possibly in a very short period of time — is the problem Bob has labelled obscurity. By establishing a small number of very well-known identity rights agreements — and giving them very simple and highly recognizable visual icons that don’t require a user to read A SINGLE WORD — the use of “obscurity” as a tool to all-but-eliminate the value of consent disappears.

Why could identity rights agreements catch on so quickly? For the simple reason that sites who want to give users the real power of consent will start to advertise that fact by posting identity rights agreement icons right on the Web form where they collect personal data. Just as millions of Internet users were first exposed to Creative Commons licenses by seeing the icon for a CC license posted on a blog or Web page they were reading, they will be exposed to Identity Commons identity rights agreements icons on Web forms. One click through to see what they mean and I predict the reaction will be, “Wonderful! I hated those indecipherable legal agreements anyway. I’m going to support sites that use these icons to let me know they are being straight with me about the use of my personal data.”

And suddenly sites become motivated to choose this simpler and more user-friendly form of consent — possibly leading to one of those rare but real “virtuous cycles” (to use a term I first learned from Bill Washburn) that can infect an entire ecosystem.

That’s why — despite my current 150%-of-my-time focus on establishing fully operational XRI infrastructure — I plan to invest time in supporting the creation of the first operational set of identity rights agreements at the revitalized Identity Commons. I’m challenging the rest of the current and new Identity Commons supporters to do the same — I want us to present the first draft set at the next Internet Identity Workshop in May.