By Judi Clark and Joe Andrieu
The Information Sharing Work Group, a working group at Kantara, has been working for several years on translating VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) principles into a legal framework for user-driven information sharing.
The basic idea is simple: before actually sharing information, people should be able to establish appropriate terms of use for their information in a binding contract with the data recipient. Since data recipients can’t afford to review a million different contracts (different ones for each user), we believe the most effective route is to standardize on a fair and reasonable contract that meets both individuals’ and vendors needs.
You can find more details about our work on our Working Group page at the Kantara Initiative.
Our approach has been to start with detailed scenarios outlining the entire relationship between an individual and multiple vendors, assuming a personal data ecosystem that enables permission based information sharing. We did this for a car buying scenario first. And then did a deep dive in the Personal RFP phase to define the actual use cases that would enable that model. We also have real estate and car rental models under development to extend the work into additional domains.
At the moment, we are working with counsel and a creative team in the UK to develop the first working draft and visual presentation of the standard information sharing agreement. Counsel is working on the first draft of the legal agreements underpinning a trust framework that would enable information sharing. The creative team is working on the visual design of the information sharing agreement label, a short form presentation of the specific data transaction agreement covering a specific sharing instance. Our goal is to create an open standard, royalty-free, cost-free legal framework that, ideally, could be used by just about all PDEC participants as a standard way for individuals to share data with value-added service providers.