IF ANY ONE COMPANY wants to control it all -- to be the single point of contact between the customer and the things the customer wants to hear, see, do, view, or buy -- the system collapses. A standard way of exchanging customer metadata can and probably will outlast the lifespan of any such company, anyway. When Amazon's PlanetAll.com site folded last year, thousands of customers lost not only the collective metadata on their alumni associations, but wasted untold hours setting up pages to reconnect with old friends and colleagues. The survival of Jeff Bezos's current concern is not written in stone, either (or, at least, not yet).

With an independent, vendor-neutral, and privacy-aware customer metadata standard, we could avoid such losses. And ultimately, if Amazon behaves themselves, I might just let them see my customer metadata I've been acquiring out on other sites on the Web; out in public on my Palm, 3G cell phone, or smart card; or while watching interactive TV. Make me an offer, Jeff. The ultimate question: What's it worth to you?

When the adoption and application of smart cards are viewed in this light, the question shifts from simply asking, "How much basic financial data and loyalty-rewards program points can we put on a smart card?" to "How much identity-rich personal metadata, with the right safeguards and encryption, would be useful on a smart card?" Of course, time will tell how well the whole concept of smart-card ownership and usage will "scrub" with customers, but we do know that the marketing challenges are enormous, especially considering how poorly things similar to smart cards have been marketed in the past. Read the fine print in Visa.com's Smart Card section of their Web site. It should inspire a feeling that there is a "value-for-value" proposition being offered, but, the truth is, you come away from it wondering what the catch is.

IT'S TIME FOR COMPANIES to open the books to their customers and show them a new level of respect. Disclosure can move us closer to closure on some of the most basic issues surrounding online privacy, but the fundamental question remains: Will customers have a seat at the table regarding the control, access, leverage, and sharing of their personal purchase histories and identity-rich metadata?

Today, numerous companies are built around business plans with biz-school catchphrases like creating "high barriers to entry" for competitors and holding customers captive with "high switching costs" -- by aggregating proprietary customer data. When the very language of the customer relationship is adversarial, is it any wonder that the slice of the pie never gets substantially larger?

In a peer-to-peer world, companies that don't (at the very least) share a salient and valuable subset of the metadata they collect on and from customers could be in trouble. If customers could have access to this information and are allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to use it to their best advantage, it could increase the size of the pie for everyone at the table, and quite possibly ameliorate many of the current concerns regarding online privacy.