A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
Other early supporters include:
- Mary Hodder
- Drummond Reed
- Ben Metcalfe
- Kaliya Hamlin
- Dick Hardt
- Dan Farber
- Simon Grice
- Loic Le Meur
- David Berlind
- Jemima Kiss
- Euan Semple
- Diego Doval
- John McCrea
- Sean Bohan
- Auren Hoffman
- Christopher Allen
- Chris Pirillo
- Adrianna Lukas
- Jeremiah Owyang
- Stowe Boyd
- Dan Gillmor
- Paolo Valdemarin
- Phil Pearson
- David Levitt
- Emily Chang
- Lee Wilkins
- Mathijs van Abbe
We’ve have a bunch of big stakeholders showing up for the DataSharingSummit and we’ll be meeting with as many major social networks as we can - more or less demanding that they agree to and support these notions.
Lots of our early supporters have been bringing up good issues to tweak the language - and that’s what we need - consensus. So stay tuned - this is just the first draft.
In case its not clear - this is what I’ve been talking about for years and the time has come to demand our rights!
Joseph has a blog post on this - as well. Robert too.
September 4th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
[…] is the document via Marc Canter: Preamble: There are already many who support the ideas laid out in this Bill of […]
September 5th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Cool. Note that the “Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others” item from the first list doesn’t have a matching action in the second list. Would be nice if there could be a “Allow their users to choose which of the above information is available to others” line in there.
September 5th, 2007 at 12:24 am
I have made Polish translation, and will support in future
September 5th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Fantastic. Great first draft. You’ve got my full support.
September 5th, 2007 at 1:19 am
[…] on the Plaxo blog, they’re building such a platform that will allow the movement of data, Marc Canter lists early signers, Scoble is in on it, and there will be plenty […]
September 5th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Thank you for taking this on, and good luck! This language seems to be a good balance between meaningful specificity and broad intention, so that you have the best chance at gathering supporters without finding out at the end that you’ve got everyone on board but no one knows where the ship is going.
September 5th, 2007 at 2:11 am
“We’ve have a bunch of big stakeholders showing up for the DataSharingSummit and we’ll be meeting with as many major social networks as we can - more or less demanding that they agree to and support these notions.”
Great initiative, thank you for that. You could show easily to these guys with this link http://docs.google.com/File?id=dchrr3kn_5cdc9q3dc that this is a real and important issue that needs to be addressed. The URL points to a part of a document on Google Docs that I as owner deleted from the Google Docs trash on the 12th of July. I hope you can get something moving with your initiative.
September 5th, 2007 at 2:25 am
[…] comes a neat manifesto: Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington drafted a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, […]
September 5th, 2007 at 4:13 am
[…] Are Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble the James Madison of Web 2.0?: Annoucing a “Bill of Rights for the Social Web.” […]
September 5th, 2007 at 5:02 am
“Facebook Follies” and what might an open social network format look like?…
UPDATE 2: Some heavy hitters in the social networking space have drafted a A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
UPDATE: From a comment by Baratunde on his blog: Why I deactivated my Facebook account on Eloquation, and (duh! Don’t know how…
September 5th, 2007 at 5:04 am
I Support The Open Social Web…
Basically the Open Social Web manifesto argues that social tool developers have to open up their systems in ways that would support interoperability through cross-connection and bleed-overOpen Social Web. Ok, I’m in, spiritually. However, I bet that t…
September 5th, 2007 at 5:30 am
[…] in addition to changing your search privacy settings on facebook, i encourage you to take a look at marc canter’s proposed bill of rights for users of social networking sites. […]
September 5th, 2007 at 6:23 am
[…] reactionary pieces of trash I’ve read in awhile. Consumer control over data portability is great (see this, for example), but that kind of backlash against data portability all-together is just […]
September 5th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Right on!
and also
Write on!
September 5th, 2007 at 6:44 am
This is a great initiative.
I think there one major thing missing though:
How can users concretely and reliably verify compliance to such rights?
We should have, as a right #1, the responsibility to provide users the concrete ability to verify all other rights.
We think we have devised processes by which the users themselves, through “democratic monitoring” processes, may be guaranteed of the actual policies as implemented by software and hardware of a given FLOSS web service solution. See more on our website, or get an intro through thi blog post: http://blog.telematicsfreedom.org/2007/04/25/free-telematics-a-model-for-the-democratic-control-of-telematic-services-2/
September 5th, 2007 at 6:46 am
A great idea, succinctly phrased. Add my name to the list.
September 5th, 2007 at 7:24 am
[…] Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington) acaban de enunciar una propuesta de derechos de los usuarios de redes sociales referentes a su información de la información. En el fondo […]
September 5th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Here’s a related issue that deserves far more attention than it gets: how about being able to join without supplying a birthdate? All a site needs is “at least 18 years old” (or “at least 13″); the rest is (alas) an invitation for identity theft. Sure, lots of people publish their birthday, but plenty don’t for good reason. (And, whether the site publishes the birthdate is not the issue. Any stored data is at risk for being revealed or stolen.)
September 5th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Ah, birthdate… something near and dear to our business - www.theastrologer.com - This really gets to a need for granular control over data. There are three levels of birthdate: Day/Mth; Year; and Time/Place. I could show everyone my Day/Mth; then allow the SN/Freinds to tap my year if I want to access astrological data or do age-based matching, or whatever. And if I know my (accurate) Time/Place of birth, then I would like to append that data (along with GMT/DST conversion) for deeper astro info. See you at the Summit…
September 5th, 2007 at 10:31 am
[…] « A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web […]
September 5th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Great start guys - can’t wait to see how this evolves. Please add me to the list
-Sean
September 5th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Openness and personal control are great ideas but the fun will really start when the attorneys get involved. To see what I mean, check out my old blog post “Should We Be Able to Buy and Sell our Personal Financial and Medical Data?” (http://www.ddmcd.com/personal_data_ownership.html) and the more recent comments attached to it. (PS - I’m not so sure about what the term “social web” means.)
September 5th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Count me among the supporters too.
September 5th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
[…] Post:Marc Canter - A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social WebRobert Scoble - Bill of Rights for participants on the social […]
September 5th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
[…] need look more closely at what Marc Canter and others are saying about my data. Not because I am worried about my privacy in the same way as others but […]
September 6th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Great job, Marc, et. al. This helps move social computing in the right direction. Unless I missed it - I’d like to see this in a place where people and companies could sign this work in progress like a petition -
September 6th, 2007 at 8:37 am
[…] Cantor and some others have created “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” which, while I can generally support in principle, is (as are most internet-based manifestos) […]
September 6th, 2007 at 9:52 am
[…] recent postings about a bill of rights for social network users is an expression of the frustration felt by people who understand they dove into media years ago, […]
September 6th, 2007 at 11:46 am
[…] The other day we blogged about Brad Fitzpatrick’s excellent piece on social graph portability and the evolution of the social web. We’re excited to see further support for this issue with the release of A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. […]
September 6th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
As published to http://skypejournal.com/blog/2007/09/rights_in_social_media.html
Marc Canter and friends are proposing a A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web (BORUS). These demands could certainly apply to Skype. As catchy as it is, BORUS is a shallow attempt to codify broader, deeper rights in cyberspace. It’s like petitioning for the right to print an afternoon edition of the local newspaper on paper instead of fighting for Freedom of Speech with heart, guns, money and blood. So…
18 Questions to the Authors:
1. Would you apply these rights to enterprise/intranet social networks?
2. Do your rights supercede an employer’s rights to manage workplace information, especially if it is to comply with laws and regulations?
3. How do we define “ownership”? Can we spell this out?
4. “activity stream of content they create” conflates two different sets of data. Do I own my “activity stream”, the metadata describing my activity on the site, including which pages I visit, forms I fill out, things I click? Would this include things like web site log files? Do I own “content I create” even if it is a collaborative work?
5. Do you provide exceptions for “except to comply with the law” and “to operate our site” to the “Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others”?
6. Can we provide a model Terms Of Service that encapsulates these ideas?
7. Must these rights be transferable? What do you want to happen when a company agreeing to these rights is bought by a company that does not agree?
8. Must a company agree to provide escrow for this data, in the event of bankruptcy or takeover by an organization that does not comply with BORUS? Failing escrow, would you rather have the company commit to destroying all copies of your data than having it fall into non-BORUS hands?
9. In addition to syndication, should your host be required to keep permanent archives of your data? Some sites discard old data.
10. Should you be allowed to download your data in a documented, machine readable form? Blog services, starting with Dave Winer’s Manila, have done this for years.
11. Do your rights of ownership include withdrawing public posts and public comments, even killing open public groups you may have created, should you choose to disappear from view on their site?
12. Do I have the right to edit information about me in other people’s address books?
13. Which of these rights extend to groups of people or other objects I’ve defined in your network?
14. Is the “Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service” subject to “Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others”?
15. Does “personal information” include information about you obtained from third parties? The way credit card companies or people-search firms do? Or the way online advertising agencies do? For example, if a facebook app shows your eBay score to other people, do you have the right to compel the site to hide that otherwise public information?
16. What are “external identifiers”? Are you referring to OpenID style logins? Or my usernames in other networks?
17. Some networks, like Skype, decentralize data, making it hard or impossible to comply with some of the syndication and linking or web access clauses. Can the language be generalized?
18. Should you insist on services defaulting to privacy instead of openness when they expose profiles to public search engines?
I wrote a “Desktop Bill of Rights” back in 1996 to set expectations between the LSI Logic IT department and its internal customers. Communication is great, governance is better. I like Matthew Green Smith’s suggestion: create a company to put a seal-of-approval on compliant services.
September 6th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
[…] people want us to go further with Bill of Rights to NON social web users, some have contributions of the grand schema of things, others have opinions over the exact language, scope and wording - while others think its a waste […]
September 6th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
[…] McCrea of Plaxo: yesterday a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web was published. It’s here. I’ll read and post about this […]
September 6th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Good work, folks. Please add me to the early-supporters list, if it’s still open.
Question: does my “ownership” of my own personal data include the right to delete it — not just hide it from public view — if I so choose?
September 6th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Cf. Comment by Philo Wolff
Do these rights address the ability to review, amend, correct, and erase personal information about you appearing elsewhere?
September 6th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
[…] new V2 API is going to help enable the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web to become a […]
September 7th, 2007 at 11:02 am
So, should the motto of the signers be SHUCK YOU!
September 7th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] Facebook, Social Software, Blogging Thanks to Maggie Fox for pointing to John McCrea’s (of Plaxo) Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web “Ownership of their own personal information, including: - their own profile data - the list […]
September 7th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
[…] - there was a session on the ‘Bill of Rights‘ we put up. Many people are calling it naive or whatever- so I think its important to say […]
September 9th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[…] I crazy? Maybe, but I am not alone. Marc Canter officially declared not just the Social Graph, but also all of the associated data generated by […]
September 13th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” - something Joseph Smarr and I created, with support from Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington - going through a rewrite now - but we’re on the right track […]
September 13th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
[…] Rights - take #2 are two posts that are reverberating throughout the blogosphere started with our Bill of Rights for users of the social web. The BoR itself is going through a rewrite its verbiage is completely vetted, consensus is built […]
September 13th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
OK, that’s a great start.
Thank you all… do add me to the supporters list, um, because you have my support
Now let’s see how close it is to the thinking of Google, who announce an initiative at the European Pariliament in Strasbourg - and whether big web organisations like Skype pick up & run with the Bill of Rights.
September 13th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
[…] for example A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and has a lot more chance of becoming accepted if it’s adopted by Google - and Skype. […]
September 14th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
[…] Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington and Joseph Smarr put together the Social Media User’s Bill of Rights. Lots of comments on the Open Social web site. My buddy Phil Wolff also adds 18 questions. In the end many users just don’t care. The reason we are interested now is the opportunity to lifestream our information. We’ve recognized that we are tweeting, blogging, updating Facebooks etc. The real change is connectivity and learning now comes from being interconnected into social hubs. The downside is managing them and we are asking for life to be simplified. […]
September 16th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
[…] goodey - more people scraping servcies. I wonder if Squidoo will support our Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media? Are their APIs? Do they both suck and […]
September 19th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
[…] So: - check out our Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 3:08 pm
[…] Not yet as polished as Facebook nor, of course, as ubiquitous but if it helps toward an open ideal then I’m ready to cut it some […]
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:41 pm
[…] and constituencies of people - that we should be focusing in on, not on buzzword du jour mentality. Serious heartfelt proposals and manifestos are being made, and folks at nipping at verbiage, terminology and […]
September 23rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
[…] than any single clickstream captured by Google or anyone else. We wouldn’t need to sign a “Bill of Rights” and we wouldn’t need to call for more open […]
September 24th, 2007 at 7:05 am
Hello everyone,
I posted my public endorsement of the Social Web Bill of Rights today on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix. If I can get involved in any way, please contact me and let me know.
Cheers,
Michael
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2007/09/social_networks_go_or_nogo_for.html
—-
Michael E. Rubin
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