Not "your data", but "your terms"?
On freedom, agency, humanity, and innovation through the contracts that shape your life
(You are reading a GenAI-free article, solely relying on auto-correct for some expressions and typos.)
What if the biggest lever to attain personal agency was not regaining control over “your data”, but rather doing so over the many terms you constantly agree to?
I have already published a longer version of my key points on a LinkedIn post, so here’s a shorter one that I can map to our Privacy Cloud journey for future reference.
You should start by looking at MyTerms and Iain Henderson ’s posts on the subject, and a good second step could be our interview with him on After The Magic. The below will then make more sense, if you abstract yourself away from privacy and look at contractual frameworks as a whole. In three parts:
When contracts become noise
In the context of so-called “clickwrap” contracts and the general struggle for individual agency in the power imbalance that results from large corporations serving millions of customers and handling the associated risks at scale, we often discuss the notion of information asymmetry and the absolute lack of real choice.
In sum, with obvious differences across jurisdictions (EU laws are more likely to strike down abusive boilerplate clauses), Terms of Service, general conditions, and even privacy notices have mostly become parasites.
In the new agentic AI scenario, this power imbalance results in one side of the table fully automating itself away (often in an undisclosed manner) while the other party is forced to remain present, unrepresented, and “non-scalable”.
When contracts are missed
Everyday human transactions, whether in person or remote, sit at the opposite end of the spectrum, refreshingly exciting and unpredictable. Contracts were naturally born in this context and remain as relevant as ever.
We have contracts because transactions and deals go sideways, not only because one of the parties may take advantage of the other, but often due to external circumstances. We need to allocate risk, rights, obligations. We need to take care of innocent third parties.
A contract is however useless without a means of enforcing it. Whereas corporations may have their own intrinsic self-enforcement tools (bring that service to a halt), individuals and small businesses (often one and the same) need an external entity, a court system, an arbitration panel, or some sort of reliable system to broker peace, find a remedy, award damages, or prevent future harms.
Agency, representation, identity, humanity
It is essential in every contract that the parties be identified uniquely for the purposes of accountability and enforcement. There was a time when this meant a unique name that connected a given individual to its ancestors and physical location, and there still is plenty of room for that in matters of public life or social impact. But as we have expanded our reach, and as our contracts and personal data have come to not only define us but rather determine our future choices (our freedom) such connection has often become excessive or just dangerous.
We need the parties to be real because we want to be certain that we will be paid, or that the contract will be fulfilled - and enforced. This does not mean that people need to be fully identified, but certain things become essential as we enter this new phase:
Are we dealing with a direct, disintermediated version of each other? When not (in full transparency), is the system claiming to represent a given individual an actual extension of that party’s will and capacity?
It comes as no surprise that we do need “proof of humanity”, but not because we should not trust systems or automation - because there are certain things that will cease to exist in fully delegated scenarios.
Conclusions, first steps
Precisely because contracts have become noise we need to build a protective layer that scans terms and conditions so that consumers and citizens have a clear understanding of their rights and obligations.
Precisely because a new wave of bartering and novel peer-to-peer services is seeing the light (and I can anticipate it will gain greater prominence in the new capital-labour decoupling), we need a more dynamic system to articulate such relationships.
Precisely because agency, representation, humanity, and identity do not have to be one and the same thing, we need more advanced means of unbundling some of these concepts while ensuring privacy, freedom, reliability, and enforcement.
All three concepts, together with a few ideas for the improvement of our daily lives, are slowly taking shape in the firmas.io application that you can already test today on iOS, Android or (with limited features) a web app. Firmas.io is also, as of now, the primary means of signing B2B contracts on Dealroom.