A personal data ecosystem must emerge because the architecture of a personal data wallet (or data store or data locker or whatever term you prefer) provides the best user experience for how consumers can interact with brands. The user experience is best because:
- You’ll never have to repeat yourself. Today you endlessly repeat yourself. How often does your first name change from being Carla? Never. So you might ask, with all this technology why are you asked for your first name more than once? The answer is architectural. You lack an agent (e.g. a data wallet etc.) that works on your behalf. If you had one, your agent could make direct observations (e.g. that we typed “Carla” in answer to the question “first name?”). It can remember your answer to “window seat or aisle?”. And it can holds all this information securely and entirely under your control.
- The wallet will bend the Internet around you. The data wallet is a rich, digital version of you. It can be queried automatically by sites, and the sites can organize their content around you. Your interest, your passions, your needs, your friends.
- You will be delighted more, disappointed less. Why? a digital agent is always on. Always working on your behalf, always looking for the best deals, the most relevant content. This is all only possible if it knows you well–and it does. It knows you better than any single site or silo ever could.
- It will enable the most efficient model of commerce. When each person has a data wallet, markets and marketing can largely be inverted. Whereas there will still be a need for broad, brand marketing, most demand can be satisfied by your agent signaling intent and relying on the natural economic market forces to dynamically assemble supply chains to meet that demand. A far more efficient solution than today’s paradigm of supply spending marketing dollars trying to find demand.
- It won’t sacrifice your privacy to get personalization. Your personal agent can be architected such that only you and whoever else you wish but not your agent service provider has access to your personal data. Despite how we’ve always done it, the reality is that almost all brands, manufacturers and service providers don’t in really need to know who you are (i.e. your real world identity). They only need to know what is needed. And they need to get paid. Nothing more. With trusted agent intermediaries, all of this is possible.
- It will keep you more secure.
A trusted agent can make assertions about you, and can convey assertions made about you by third parties that are cryptographically verifiable. It can do so while minimizing disclosure. It can authenticate you (vs. someone masquerading as you) with a simple, convenient set of knowledge-based, physical and biometric challenges of various kinds. These characteristics enable far higher security than exists today while eliminating any need for passwords and other shared secrets.