[Philip Lelyveld comment: it is good that the issue is being revisited, especially in light of Google and Facebook's new policies that don't give you the option of protecting your privacy and using your identity in 3rd party ads. But his proposed solution, cryptographic wrappers, fundamentally won't work because of the open nature of OS's.]
“Now that you’re just being observed, whether it’s for commercial purposes or other activities, we have to move to a new model.”
Mundie, who until late last year was in charge of Microsoft’s research wing as its chief research and strategy officer, thinks a system of DRM technology, accompanied by laws and regulations to enforce it, could provide the answer. “I think we’re going to have to have a usage-based way of controlling this now,” he said. “One way to do that is to put cryptographic wrappers around these things that control uses of this data.”
...said Mundie: “You want to say that there are substantial legal penalties for anyone that defies the rules in the metadata. I would make it a felony to subvert those mechanisms.”