Redefining and Standardizing ‘Ownership’ Post on DataPortability Project Blog
danielabarbosa
to the DataPortability Project Blog- if not please subscribe!.
http://blog.dataportability.org
This evening I published a post titled- Redefining and Standardizing
‘Ownership’ based on the news around Facebook's recent terms of
service changes and the work that our Project's EULA and ToS Taskforce
is doing. You can read the post here:
http://blog.dataportability.org/index.php/2009/02/redefining-and-standardizing-ownership/
Feel free to leave comments, publish your thoughts on your personal
blogs etc.
thanks!
-daniela
Daniela Barbosa
DataPortability Co-founder and Chairperson
http://www.danielabarbosa.com
www.dataportability.org
Elias Bizannes
Elias Bizannes
http://liako.biz
Gordon Rae
Daniela,
Thanks for blogging this, as Facebook has made it a very topical issue, and the conversation is going round the Internet as we speak. I posted a comment on the blog, but I’ll repeat it here with more detail, and links to sources online.
Ownership of data is a red herring. (Daniela and Elias are quite right on that topic.) But I don’t agree that ‘we need a new term to describe our relationship to personal data’ For thirty years the law on personal data has been framed in terms of security and privacy. This goes back to the OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and the Transborder Flows of Personal Data, which were debated in the late ‘70s and finally published in 1980. Those guidelines inform the laws on data protection and data portability in most countries of the world.
The chair of the OECD expert group, by the way, was the prominent Australian lawyer Justice Michael Kirby. His speeches on the subject are indexed on his website - http://michaelkirby.com.au - (But I tried to download a PDF today and the link was broken.)
Roger Clarke, an Australian academic (@ ANU) and consultant specialising in electronic commerce since mainframes ruled the earth (I mean the 80’s), has written a very good ‘History of Privacy’, http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/OzHC.html which although it only covers one country, covers the ins and outs of just about all the significant concepts around data portability.
The Facebook TOS asks: "You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof." You’ll see that there’s no mention of ownership of the data, but a very big assertion of Facebook’s rights over anything that users decide to post on the service, and not much offered by way of respect for your rights, or allowing you to delete your data, or take it back, or move it to someplace else..
Brian Solis (PR 2.0) published a good discussion of the issues raised by the Facebook TOS here: http://is.gd/jQhI He makes the point that it’s a universal issue, not just a Facebook issue. There are many rights that an operator needs to be able to manage the data that users upload.
Web.tech.law has a good blog about the legal significance of Facebook’s new TOS http://webtechlaw.com/what-facebooks-revised-terms-use-mean-your-content One disturbing idea I picked up from here is that if I post a link to some content (Elias’ blog, for example) Facebook not only claims rights over that content, it also deems that I have affirmed that those rights were mine to give away. That’s extreme.
Gordon Rae
Gordon Rae
Mike Masnick posted an item on Techdirt proposing “a Creative Commons-like standard setup for privacy policies”. I’ve added details to the EULA / TOS Thread.
Gordon Rae
Jonathan Vanasco
addressing the same items and concepts as Zuckerberg.
Some very smart people on this list were gracious enough to provide
feedback , however we've been too busy to incorporate all of it
In light of the recent Facebook TOS debacle though, I've decided to
publish the early drafts.
They link , with a bit of an overview, from here:
http://www.destructuring.net/archives/2009/02/19/regarding-the-facebook-tos-d.html
Please be aware - as these are drafts, they're full of puns and light
humor !