A recent New York Times article has some precious and prescient commentary about how to address concerns with the abundance of data being collected as we move further into the digital age, something I wrote a bit about yesterday.
Here’s Insight #1:
“The myth is that companies have to know all this information about you in order to do business with you,” said Drummond Reed, vice president for infrastructure at Parity Communications, an identity technology company in Needham, Mass. “But from a liability perspective, the less I know about my customers the better.”
Hence, I get cranky when accountants want my SSN before they’ll reimburse travel expenses even though they are under no obligation to report such payments to the IRS.
And here’s Idea #1, from Mike Neuenschwander at the Burton Group:
Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.
Once their individual personas are created, consumers would be able to use them as their legal “alter ego,” even in financial transactions. “My L.L.P. would have its own mailing address, its own tax ID number, and that’s the information I’d give when I’m online,” Mr. Neuenschwander said. Other benefits include the ability for “personas” to limit their financial exposure in ways that individuals cannot.
People already create digital alter egos all the time – think eBay usernames – but the practice has yet to cross over to “legitimacy.”
Think about it: corporations use trademarks and trade names all the time, but when humans do it, it is assumed to be fraud. That should change, as people use trade names for the very legitimate purpose of maintaining walls of separation among different dimensions of their lives.
Blog buzz on the Burton Group “LLP” idea here and here and here.
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