Future of digital identity and interfaces
This post was originally a response to Request for curiosity by SPC
How (or will) data go from platform owned to user owned?
There are small universes where user-driven data portability has led to a massive upheaval in the economy and kindled the growth of new products already. One such example is Plaid, who initially set out to build a consumer-facing financial planning app but quickly realized the difficulty in accessing consumer data from financial institutions. This challenge led them to pivot and focus on creating an infrastructure to enable API-driven sharing of financial data between services. Today, they are a $13+B billion company connecting 12,000+ banks and financial institutions with 500 million connected accounts. India's account aggregator and UPI infrastructure is another example, boasting a rapid adoption of 28.4 million accounts linked in two years and a 26% month-on-month growth rate.
The impetus for the financial world is understandably much higher than and precedes that of marketing as it concerns the consumer's livelihood, but that is not the case anymore. The parallels between the pre-Plaid financial services world and the pre-data portable (current) marketing and advertising world are striking:
Just as banks previously acted as siloed gatekeepers of financial data, today's major advertising platforms and marketing technology companies maintain tight control over valuable consumer behavioral data. Meta, Google, and other major platforms effectively function as "data banks," holding vast repositories of user interaction data, browsing patterns, and purchase behaviors with limited transparency or portability.
Similar to how financial institutions were reluctant to open up their data systems pre-Plaid, today's advertising giants are hesitant to enable true data portability, citing security concerns while protecting their competitive advantages. Just as banks profited from exclusive access to transaction data, these platforms monetize their exclusive insight into user behavior through targeted advertising systems and drive their revenue. While Google and Meta continue to innovate and promise better solutions, their revenue pillars are still entrenched in the outdated practices rife with issues.
The transformation potential is comparable too. Just as Plaid democratized access to financial data, enabling a new generation of fintech innovations, consumer data portability in marketing could spawn entirely new categories of consumer-centric applications.
With the threat of deprecation of cookies and privacy laws aimed at bringing users to the center of every personal-data transaction, I strongly believe that the changes in data infrastructure to enable consumer-driven information liquidity are imminent.
Now to answer more specific questions:
Will users want to port their data / personal foundation model across services?
I think users' wanting to port data will take the form of demand for new agentic services which will require the context of the user to be able to perform actions on their behalf. I expect this demand will push for changes in the infrastructure. Some of them are already underway, for example: LLM-readable formats like
llms.txtare now being baked into websites for AI to access data and execute tasks. The web itself is becoming machine-legible, a system optimized for AI-driven actions rather than human clicks and scrolls.
How will user privacy evolve?
Having worked in the world of data privacy for the past 6 years, I have seen the underbelly of data sharing in the US economy and, tersely put, the adherence to these laws is merely cosmetic across many industries. While the push for consumers to be in control via regulations is already underway with GDPR, CCPA, Virginia's privacy laws and more coming up, the real problems I think are transparency and enforcement.
Govt. regulations, increasing privacy awareness of consumers, the rise of tools to be able to track your footprint and submit deletion requests for consumers like Mine, and privacy management tools like Osana for Enterprises, are catalyzing this evolution of user privacy from multiple different angles.
I also think that the widespread adoption of blockchain is necessary to fully address the issues around trust and verifiability of the various policies that we come up with.
How will businesses adjust to high value users putting a premium on their personal data?
I recently requested many publishers such as NYT to share the data they have on me and also ubmitted a deletion request. It took some of them ninety days to be able to get my data together and respond to the request. I think such requests will only continue to increase and will illuminate the gaps around transparency and levity with which user data is being handled today.
While putting a premium on users data may seem like a bane for the businesses at first, this can actually better leverage of the economies of scale by being able to transact with the consumers directly (the real owners of the data) with trust increasing loyalty, brand value and LTV.
What role does crypto play in this world?
The way I see it, blockchains essentially added new capabilities for computers and networks to be able to do two things: first, facilitate trust by providing verifiable guarantees, and second, enable self-organization of network behaviors that can be collectively embedded into the network.
When this is applied to the world of user data, they provide the infrastructure for secure identity, data authenticity, and monetization without centralized gatekeepers. TEE (secure enclaves), decentralized storage or blockchain-based attestation could ensure that personal data wallets aren't controlled by any single entity. Personal AI models (or intermediate representations such as user-embeddings) in the future might store cryptographic proofs of credentials, certifications, or subscriptions on a distributed ledger. Services can verify these proofs without learning more than necessary.
Identity and consumer authenticated AI agents will become the backbone for such experiences.
Having made the above points, I believe that this is a smaller fragment of a much more deeper and hairier problem in the trillion dollar personal computing industry, which is already on the cusp of a major revolution.
Everyone operating in the world of interfaces is dreaming of a future where our computing experiences feel as fluid and natural as our thoughts—where the boundary between physical and virtual realities fades, and our tools truly understand who we are, what we need, and why we need it. We imagine interacting through multimodal interfaces—smart glasses, voice assistants, wearable devices—seamlessly blending our digital and physical worlds. In such a world, we wouldn’t be forced to navigate fragmented ecosystems of apps and platforms. Instead, our intentions would lead directly to results.
Today's digital world is fractured not just at the interface level, but at its very foundation. Tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have built trillion-dollar empires by controlling entire computing ecosystems - from hardware to operating systems to app stores. Each maintains its walled garden, creating artificial boundaries in users' digital lives.
It represents a fundamental disconnect between how humans naturally think and work, and how the world of technology operates. When a user wants to plan a trip, their intention is unified - "plan my vacation." But the digital journey fragments this single intention into dozens of disjointed actions across multiple platforms: researching destinations on Chrome, checking flights on Kayak, reading reviews on TripAdvisor, coordinating dates on Calendar, budgeting in Spreadsheets, and sharing plans via Email or Messages.
Each context switch, each new app opened, each time a user needs to re-explain their intention to a different system - these aren't just inconveniences. They actively dilute the user's original purpose and drain their cognitive energy. The natural flow of human intention is constantly interrupted by the artificial boundaries of our digital tools.
I believe that this CONTEXT of the user KEY to this UNIFICATION of these fragmented pieces in the industry and this has the potential to change how businesses platforms and consumer marketplaces are designed. I have been exploring to solve this problem from various perspectives and currently am crystallizing each of these perspectives into a testable set of hypotheses.