Data intermediaries are key to ensuring digital agency and privacy

Web 3.0 will bring about a step-change in the relationship between people and technology. In screenless environments where we want seamless interaction, how will we ensure agency over data as it is collected and processed in real time?

The experts discussed the power of data intermediaries as a key to trusted human-technology interaction – and how policymakers and businesses are thinking about this issue of human agency and privacy in new online scenarios. This event was part of the launch of ‘Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries,’ a report co-authored by the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Data Intermediaries.

Anne Flanagan, Project Lead, Data Policy, World Economic Forum

Caroline Louveaux, Chief Privacy Officer, Mastercard

Allan Millington, Global Data Policy Leader, EY

Richard Whitt, President, GLIA Foundation

Kate Kaye, Senior Report, AI and Data, Protocol

These are some of the key quotes from the session:

Louveaux said every time we want do anything online we have to consent to lengthy privacy notices and terms and conditions - but we don't feel our privacy is better protected.

"There must be a more meaningful way to protect our privacy without killing the user experience. What if we could delegate to a data intermediary the task of reading all these privacy notices and to advise us on whether to share our data?"

We could set up preferences up front, so the data intermediary could make decisions for us based on our preferences, she added.

"Data intermediaries could store our personal information in a space and allow third party organizations access to very specific pieces of information about us for defined purposes based on our preferences. Data intermediaries could also negotiate a fee for our data... there's no one-size fits all approach."

But she cautioned that we need to address challenges such as which law would apply to data intermediaries and who would determine liability for data intermediaries?

Millington said the issues include how to narrow the trust gap as well as data permissibility.

The data intermediary sets up a neutral body which helps to bridge the gap between supply and demand.

"The 'trusted digital agent' is an interesting dynamic where you delegate that permission. Even though organizations have the legal basis to use personal data through the notice of consent, is it really meaningful consent? And that's a problem right now. So the trusted digital agent concept could be a game-changer.

"You can think about trust being a new disruptor - and the way to master that power of data is to close that gap of trust. That's going to be key for our clients and any company out there, to use data more meaningfully."

Whitt said the current web lacks accountability on behalf of the online platforms and it lacks agency and a sense of recourse for the rest of us.

"Data governance is the rules of the road - who sets those rules and who enforces those rules? How do you create a world of data intermediaries where there's trustworthiness based on fiduciary laws of trust, good faith of care and loyalty and make that fully accountable to human beings.

"Some would call that checks and balances - I prefer to call multiple layers of accountability 'belts and suspenders', so you need to have the private sector, the public sector and multi-stakeholder groups involved in different ways."

We need "coalitions of the willing" to create codes of conduct that everyone adheres to - and over time this could turn into a profession.

Whitt said there's a lot of talk about making 'institutional AIs' - the systems run by online platforms - more accountable to us, but we need to "raise the stakes".

"We need to have personal AIs which represent us, which have machine learning algorithms that are trained on us, that we can interact with on a real-time basis, that can represent us in the real world, whether it's on our screens or in a smart city environment, that's our constant, interactive digital avatar.

"To make that work, effective and accountable, it needs to be attached to something, so that's where it can be the front to a fiduciary, or a trust or data steward that has that important set of duties of care to me as an individual to make sure it's acting on my behalf. You need the technology and the governance in the back end to ensure it's working together and representing you in the first instance and not someone else."

The smart city, using the Internet of Things, will be one example of where we might need our own personal AI to interact computationally for us in a way humans can't.