So this is getting very interesting: The world’s largest chip maker wants to see a new kind of economy bloom around personal data (article here).

It looks like Intel is entering into the personal data & big data narrative. Given that Intel owns a considerable chunk of the motherboard & SoC real-estate (think Processors, discrete TPMs, AMT, etc. etc), they do indeed have access to the plumbing of my machine.

One question is whether hardware and chipset providers will begin to require end-users to agree to Terms of Service (allowing them to access data bits moving around the board). Such a move would complicate the user’s life.  A typical person would then be forced to accept TOS and EULAs at three layers (at least):

• The hardware layer.
• The OS level (think EULAs)
• The application layer (think EULAs when installing Office productivity tools)
• The Services Provider (SP) and IdP layer (think Click-Thru agreement when signing-up to accounts)