Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

The deadline for the SXSW community feedback on proposed programming is August 27 at 11:59 p.m. CDT.  Hey, that’s, um, *really really soon*!  Apologies for the short notice, but it’s not too late to vote.

There are quite a few privacy-related panels, including several CFP 2010 speakers:

• Christina Gagnier’s Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights: You Decide
• Nicole Ozer’s Big Brother on the Big Screen
• Chris Conley I Can Has Appz and Privacy Too?
• Kevin Bankston’s Legal Bootcamp.

Quite a few past CFP speakers and organizational stalwarts have proposals there, including Shireen Mitchell with Lifecycles Tech & Society: Is 14yr Olds too Old?, Colin McKay on Trust and Control -The Future of Privacy Online, Karen Reilly of the Tor Project with  Stalking Success: Privacy and Advocacy Can Be Friends, and Eva Galperin of EFF with The Epic Fail of BitTorrent Indie Film Lawsuits.

And if that’s not enough, there are also a lot of other interesting proposals from perspectives we don’t hear a lot of at CFP such as Adria Richards’ What The Government Can Learn From Amazon, Teresa Caro’s Invade my Privacy, Please!, Gail Medeiros’ Hospitals: To Facebook or Not to Facebook?, Tammy Young’s Healthy Privacy: Can Health Insurance Companies Be Social?, Ana Andjelic’s Ladies Claim Digital Strategy is the New Creativity,  Stowe Boyd’s The War On Flow: A Culture War, Jeff Jarvis’  Let’s Get Naked, and Wayne Sutton’s Exploring the Lack of Diversity in the Technology Industry.

So check ‘em out, and vote!

jon

PS: I’m sure there are some relevant people and proposals I missed.  Please drop ‘em in the comments!

There’s been a lot of action on Twitter about the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights (#BillOfRights for short) and a steady stream of blog posts.   How to build on this encouraging start?

There are a couple of obvious next steps:

• translating it into other languages.  [Thanks once again to Gabriele Pohl for taking the lead with the German translation Grundrechteerklärung für soziale Netzwerke.]
• a web site making it easy for people to vote.  We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that it would be better to vote on each right individually.
• media outreach, following up with people who have covered about Facebook’s privacy issues, and the FTC settlement with Twitter, and open source alternatives.
• linking up our work with other organizations like the Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles
• engagement with various social network sites: the big commercial ones like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Yahoo! as well as smaller ones and the new batch of open source alternatives

If you’ve got thoughts about any of these, or have other suggestions, please leave a message in the comments!   And if you’re interested in helping with any of the above, please let us know, here or on Twitter.

And now back to the buzz.
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More excellent coverage!  To wit:

• Wendy Grossman Facebook Dominates the Privacy Agenda, v3.co.uk, frames the context of today’s world as an unexpected variant of Orwell’s 1984, with people paying to hand their information over to thousands of Little Brothers and eagerly carrying tracking devices (aka mobile phones).  With quotes from Pam Dixon, Miranda Mowbray, Lauren Gelman, and others, it’s a great roundup.
• Beat The Chip’s Cyber Security, digital activism highlights Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference 2010 has a podcast on the technology fair, and a detailed look at the video that’s available from our web site..  It ends with some thoughts on CFP’s value and its “unlimited potential to create contact between worlds which are usually alienated from one another to share their perspectives and stories.”
• A Manifesto in the Name of Privacy, by Terry Sweeney on Internet Evolution, speaks approvingly of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights: “I like what CFP has done because I think they’ve covered all the bases, and they’ve done it with language that 95 percent of Web users can understand.”  There’s good stuff in the comments, too, including a point from smkinoshita on the importance of education.
  
• On Information Week, Alison Diana covers #BillOfRights in Social Networking Bill of Rights released.
• Social Media coach Janet Fouts’ Social Networks and Privacy has some excellent tips for activists, or anybody else, concerned about privacy on social networks.
  

If you know of links I’ve missed, please drop them in the comments or tweet them on the #cfpconf hashtag.  Thanks as always!

jon

For the full text of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights, also known as #BillOfRights, see our Facebook page.  For more background on the project, see It’s time for a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights and Conference Crafting ‘Bill of Rights’ for Social Networks

Getting the social networks to buy in may not be so easy. Asked to comment on the principles, Facebook said it opposed some, and Google and Twitter declined to comment, with a Google spokeswoman saying the company already has its own set of posted privacy standards.

Facebook said in a prepared statement that while it shared the goal of ensuring “a safe and trusted environment” for its more than 400 million users, “we don’t agree with all of the proposed elements of the Bill of Rights for social-network users.” Facebook has opposed allowing users to use pseudonyms; the social network says it is based on “a real name culture.”

– Online privacy: ‘Bill of rights’ for social networking debated in San Jose, Mike Swift, Mercury News.com

Quick responses indeed.  We knew that the use of psdeudonyms would be a contentious issue.  For more about why it’s included, including its importance to domestic violence survivors,  see the discussion here.

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For more background on the social network users’ bill of rights, also known as #BillOfRights, please see It’s time for a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights,

We the users expect social network sites to provide us the following rights in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system:

1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service
2. Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand
3. Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification
4. Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
5. Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies
6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others
7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first
8. Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
9. Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data
10. Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised
11. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
12. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
13. Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions
14. Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data

The completed Social Network Users’ Bill of Right is now up for voting on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s how you can vote on it:

• On Facebook: like the #BillOfRights page to vote ‘yes’, or like the No to the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights page to vote ‘no’
• On Twitter: Tweet one of the following:

@cfpconf: “yes” to the #BillOfRights http://act.ly/23h
@cfpconf: “no” to the #BillOfRights http://act.ly/23i

• You can also vote via Doodle — by name, or psuedonymously

More sites coming soon.

Once we get some sleep, we’ll present the document to the companies running various social network sites.

Thanks to everybody involved in the process!

jon

Update, June 20: We’ve got a summary of Facebook and Google’s initial responses and other follow-on discussions.  Stay tuned!

This is the version we’ll be debating and voting on Friday afternoon starting at 1:00 p.m. (Pacific time), webcast at cfp2010.org.  Please join us!  We’ll post a final draft and voting instructions at 3:00 p.m.

If you’ve got any reactions, or would like to propose amendments or wording changes, please leave a comment.

For more background on the social network users’ bill of rights, also known as #BillOfRights, please see It’s time for a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights,

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• The Happy Accident, A Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights?, Greg Pincus’ coverage of the Bill of Rights discussion.
• Center for Democracy & Technology Blog, Conference Crafting ‘Bill of Rights’ for Social Networks, Erica Newland on the Bill of Rights discussion.
• BLOG@CACM, CFP: Intelligent Transportation Systems, Katy Nelson’s summary of the ITS panel.
• eSecurity Planet, Microsoft: Privacy in the Cloud Is a Priority, Stuart Johnson on Peter Cullen’s keynote from CFP’s opening day.

It’s another big day!  Here’s the webcast schedule:

• 9:30 a,m. (Pacific time) Keynote: Human Rights and the Web (Kent Walker, Google)
• 11:15 a.m. Can an App Do That?, with Tim Sparapani of Facebook and Chris Conley of the Northern California ACLU
• 1:30 p.m. Mobile Phones and Personal Data Collection: Avoiding and Resisting Surveillance
• 3:00 p.m. Net Neutrality 2.0

And don’t forget our Twitter chat at 7 p.m. on the #BillOfRights hashtag — check out the latest draft of the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights!

If you’re at the conference in person, there’s a lot more going on too: breakout sessions on User-generated Content, CFP from a Corporate Perspective, Hot topics in privacy., Virtual Goods Offers, Obfuscating your Search History, and Work in Progress research presentations.  See you there!

jon

For more background on the social network users’ bill of rights, also known as #BillOfRights, please see It’s time for a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights,  We’ve got a Twitter chat at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, and will be webcasting our closing session with debate and voting Friday at 1:00 p.m.  Please join us!

Thanks to Karima, David, Erica, Sean, Emma, Harry, Kaliya, and everybody else who chimed in.  Harry’s excellent notes have the details of our discussion. Here’s our revised draft.   Great progress — although as you can see, there’s still a fair amount of work to be done.

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