Fiduciary

Full Title or Meme

A Fiduciary is someone who manages money or other property for someone else. When you're named a fiduciary and accept the role, you must – by law – manage the person's property for their benefit, not yours.

Duties

The five fiduciary duties are:

1. Duty of loyalty: Fiduciaries must act in good faith and put the interests of the business or corporation first, above their own personal interests.
2. Duty of care: Fiduciaries accept legal responsibility for the care they provide.
3. Duty of confidentiality: Fiduciaries must keep confidential any information that could weaken the principal's bargaining position.
4. Duty of good faith: Fiduciaries must act with honesty, good faith, and fairness when handling corporate obligations.
5. Duty of obedience: Fiduciaries must carry out the organization's mission.

Context - Data

Operating under the assumption that people now own or will acquire ownership of data about themselves then it should be a natural extension to image that data fiduciaries might operate on the owner's behalf like ASCAP works on behalf of composers and publishers.

• Key Points from Journal on International Law article by Delarox and Lawrence

1. The current lack of legal mechanisms that may plausibly empower us, data subjects to ‘take the reins’ of our personal data leaves us vulnerable. Recent regulatory endeavors to curb contractual freedom acknowledge this vulnerability but cannot, by themselves, remedy it—nor can data ownership. The latter is both unlikely and inadequate as an answer to the problems at stake.
2. We argue that the power that stems from aggregated data should be returned to individuals through the legal mechanism of Trusts.
3. Bound by a fiduciary obligation of undivided loyalty, the data trustees would exercise the data rights conferred by the GDPR (or other top-down regulation) on behalf of the Trust’s beneficiaries. The data trustees would hence be placed in a position where they can negotiate data use in conformity with the Trust’s terms, thus introducing an independent intermediary between data subjects and data collectors.
4. Unlike the current ‘one size fits all’ approach to data governance, there should be a plurality of Trusts, allowing data subjects to choose a Trust that reflects their aspirations, and to switch Trusts when needed. Data Trusts may arise out of publicly or privately funded initiatives.
5. By potentially facilitating access to ‘pre-authorized’, aggregated data (consent would be negotiated on a collective basis), our data Trust proposal may remove key obstacles to the realization of the potential underlying large datasets.