Sunday, 15 March 2009 at 5:00PM
Presenters:
EFF is a legal firm with a technological arm and activism arm. Their goal is to create precedence to guide what we feel the law should be. They often view their job as updating what the law applies to in the digital age.
There is an ecology of groups like this now (consumer groups, network neutrality, ACLU, etc.).
The first place they see things going toward the evil end is where the start uppers have complete control and then they lose control over areas that they knew could be potential security/privacy issues. But after a buyout, for example, they no longer have control over that information. They have a terms of service diff generator that archives the evolution of a company’s terms of service. They were surprised at the frequency of the ToS changes. People lose interest in the changes becuase they change so much. This last change to Facebook’s ToS is an example of this. Geeks tend to be packrats and there is very little control over the archiving of all this information collection. They call this a honeypot. So when a buy occurs the use of that huge list of teenage phone numbers may become an issue. What is needed is a plan of how and why you are going to use that data. Weblogs becoming the tools of marketers if a lighter case of this. In Europe thre is a data retention requirement so governments can look back through it in the case of an incident. Many times these problems are caused by a mismatch in IP law and commonly accepeted online experience. There is all too often an undo deference to lawyers by developers. For example, Beacon was not meant to be evil and it had all the correct legal permissions, but it flopped horribly. Often there is a tension between the developers promise not to spam users and doing things “without notice”. Technically, there is nothing evil about changing your ToS so that you can perpetually change your ToS “without notice”, but users will notice and then it explodes. Lawyers just reading the privacy policies are not enough. It needs to be a conversation about what the engineers are doing with data and what the future holds.
Why are there not the equivalents of a track changes or diff displayed when a ToS is changes? Is there at least a bill of rights that can guide the creation of a ToS to replace copying and pasting from someone else?
Flickr sues the ToS to encompass the small possible legalese and then the rest is more human readable in their community guidelines. (”Don’t be creepy”)
An escape plan for your user’s data needs to be created early on. Everyone who wants to make money off this data will be against this idea. Flickr does a decent job of this. Privacy policies are descriptions of use and what data is collected. A problem arises when the extraction and deletion of a users data leaves a hole in the social web of a community that is ugly. By definition, social networks are not cleanly silo’d for easy extraction of one’s data. This is often discussed in terms of “ownership” of the data, but data does not work that way. We do not have the vocabulary to discuss this, yet. Many times the problem is people’s folk ideas of what IP rights they have or even that IP rules/law apply at all. They usually do not.
Bluehost and Zimbabwe activists: research this, bluehost boy.