We Need a People’s Terms of Service Agreement with Face Book ....................................... a “People’s Terms of Service Agreement—a common reference point and stamp of approval, like a Fair Trade label for the web, to govern the next photo-sharing app or responsible social network.” Together, we could pressure existing Internet companies to adopt our terms of service, to show us they take some of our basic rights into consideration in the way they operate and behave. Included in the People’s Terms of Service–in addition to key issues involving transparency, intellectual property, confidentiality, and data security—we imagine adding something we didn’t initially include: a promise not to wrongfully manipulate user’s contributions to a medium. Yet this road, too, is steep. Few agreements are as non-negotiable as Terms of Use, so for such a strategy to work, we’d need to more competition among the major tech players—and someone would have to step up to be the first to sign on. While no single effort is a panacea, more pervasive attempts at reform and reminders why change is needed, can lead us to a true solution: a gradual but irrefutable shift in what we demand from information intermediaries. University of Maryland law professor James Grimmelmann—one of the more vocal critics in this debate—accurately stated, “The study itself is not the problem; the problem is our astonishingly low standards for Facebook and other digital manipulators.” Realistically, our standards will not change overnight. But by changing the way we talk about who is harmed when we disclose, by reading stories about the problems with data manipulation, and by demanding more accountability from companies who use our online information, piece by piece we become more cognizant of our role in data manipulation, and we grow one step closer to a social accountability movement born of the realization that we’re all in this together.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 01:26:31 +0000