Thanks again Alan. As I know you know, dialogue is the only way forward!

I am a student of institutional theory and, of equal import here, extitutional theory. (For anyone following our conversation who hasn't come across the latter, you can learn about it here on Medium: https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/an-introduction-to-extitutional-theory-e74b5a49ea53)

Your institutional description is unarguable at the level of detail we're going into here. But it desperately needs the corresponding extitutional description for completeness.

I think perhaps the mechanism you're describing in your comment here is best summed up by the adage: We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. (Ref: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/26/shape/)

This quip may be pithy but can, erroneously, plant the idea that the process is A followed by B, whereas of course A and B play out concurrently and reflexively.

In overly simplistic terms, you're focused on propagating the shape of the digital tools we inherited and my analysis joins others' analyses in determining the ill-effects of that shape so that we might reflect and change that which does not serve us well. And in fact I too put great store in tools we inherited, it's just they're tools that have been around very much longer.

So to so-called personal data. You are prompting me to describe it in ways I've not described it before. How does this sound? ...

Just because you think of it as personal data, just because you call it personal data, just because you associate it with personal computing and personal data stores, does not in fact make it personal data. It remains interpersonal data, but it's interpersonal data subject to some artificial constraints preventing it from being as valuable as it might otherwise be and with significant negative externalities.

This leaves personal data defined as a legal concept first and foremost, and a common mislabelling of interpersonal data in reality.

You point to the necessity to think clearly. May I ask you then to list all the types of data you call personal data that are not in reality interpersonal data? It doesn't get more practical than that question I think, or any more observational to your point.

Please know that I'm not criticising Mydex's motivations. Far from it. You are architecting the wrong kind of system by my analysis but for all the right sort of reasons. If you disagree then, to your last point here, my essay last year (Human identity: the number one challenge in computer science) demands re-examining. I welcome your examination!