Stephanie Perrin: Ambassador developing a best practice privacy framework for using the Interledger Protocol

I am delighted to join the Ambassadors at Interledger to work on a project to encourage the protection of personal information when introducing the Interledger protocol in payment systems. We don’t have a lot of privacy built into current payment systems, and we don’t have a lot of control over how an open-source protocol is used. It seems important then that we make it crystal clear what can be done, how future payment systems can ensure that we pay less to move our money around, both in currency and in our personal information.

I have worked in the privacy field for over forty years, internationally and on domestic legislation, and most recently at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a representative of civil society, working for better protection of WHOIS information.

I also have been working recently on Artificial Intelligence and best practices, so it is a leap for me to switch to banking and payment systems, although a welcome challenge. My goal is to develop a set of best practices or policies for protecting privacy in the integration of the protocol in a variety of payment systems, with sample use cases and a training toolkit for developers.

Given the general lack of understanding in the public about what actually goes in current payment systems, let alone the new ones being developed, my first challenge will be explaining what exists now… all help from this community is gratefully accepted! Next is to set realistic expectations, based on scholarly research and review of the work that data commissioners have done to apply privacy law to the banking and payment systems.

We aim to do better, but what does better mean? How can we audit what is happening in payment systems, how do we integrate our privacy expectations with other necessary banking standards that may or may not have been developed in compliance with the fundamental rights of the individual? I will publish a report on findings, with a model privacy impact assessment framework, and a human rights impact assessment.

This promises to be a challenge for a six month assignment. I also aim to interview the representatives of certain vulnerable communities, focusing on the elderly and temporary foreign workers, both of whom send money across borders to a great extent, and not always in circumstances that work to their advantage. What are their complaints? How is their personal information being managed now, and is there a history of complaints and successful appeals in the case of breaches or abuse? What further policy needs to be developed?

Given the length of time I have worked in this field, I am reaching out to a wide variety of friends and experts in the field of privacy to get advice on the application of privacy law and standards.

I look forward to working with this community to seek advice on how this technology works for people, and what our goals should be.