Accept my EULA (or... turning the tables)
I think by now we're all pretty much aware of the idea of an End User License Agreement (EULA) for software. This is the means by which companies try to limit what rights we have with respect to software we pay them for. Setting out our rights in clear terms is a sound principle. The problems tend to occur where EULA's are unclear (either deliberately or otherwise) or EULA's are drafted by a party in a monopoly power position and thus unfair to one party.
Usually that party is us.
Pretty soon I'm hoping to have a version of PAOGAperson (our application for managing your life online) which will support publishing subsets of the information that is securely stored.
The idea is that you have your core identity that, over the years, will become very wide and deep as it covers all aspects of your life. At different times, and in different contexts, you're going to want to share subsets of this information. We're calling this ability persona's. Ultimately you will be able to create a range of them (business persona, family persona, patient persona, employer persona, job seeker persona, friend persona, public persona, deceased persona, etc...)
Now it occurred to me back when I was first scoping out this stuff that it was a great opportunity to turn the tables on businesses that have been exploiting us. Our persona's should come with an EULA that determines the rights those businesses have with respect to the data we are publishing (which might turn out to be no rights at all).
So for example I imagine at some point we'll have some kind of dialog when you come to publish a persona that will (if we don't already know) help us to understand your tolerance to risk, the context in which you are publishing the information, uses you want to permit, and then suggest one of a range of licenses to attach to the data and which will either be embedded in the data or which will have to be accepted by the information-consumer before they get their hands on your goodies.
As a jumping off point I've wondered about using the Creative Commons licenses. For example if I am creating a persona to publish my email address for friends and relatives then perhaps an Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license would be appropriate?
I'd love to hear what people think of the idea of turning the tables and using an EULA to control the uses that can be made of your data and about using Creative Commons licenses in particular.