RT @EFF: Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users: The rights to informed decision-making, to control & to leave. http://eff.org/r.2kx
Social network service providers today are in a unique position. They are intermediaries and hosts to our communications, conversations and connections with loved ones, family, friends and colleagues. They have access to extremely sensitive information, including data gathered over time and from many different individuals.
Here at EFF, we've been thinking a lot recently about what specific rights a responsible social network service should provide to its users. Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:
#1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making
Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.
Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.
Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.
#2: The Right to Control
Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users' right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.
Social network services must ask their users' permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users' data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be "opt-in" by default, not "opt-out," meaning that users' data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.
#3: The Right to Leave
Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.
One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service's servers.
Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as "data portability" or "data liberation," is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.
I recently called for businesses to broaden their perspective of Social Media from an experimental stage of acting and reacting, to one of learning and leading through intelligence, participation, and also publishing. Creating social profiles and broadcasting tweets and status updates is elementary, whereas creating a meaningful presence through the development and dissemination of remarkable content is judicious.
What lies ahead is an inflection point in the maturation of social media, publishing, marketing and communications. And, it all begins with the realization and the corresponding actions that businesses must become media in order to earn greater relevance and ultimately thought leadership within their respective markets.
Good friend Tom Foremski is leading a powerful movement to rally companies towards a new media (r)evolution. As he has so astutely observed, every company is a media company or EC=MC:
Every company is a media company because every company publishes to its customers, its staff, its neighbors, its communities. It doesn’t matter if a company makes diapers or steel girders, it must also be a media company and know how to use all the media technologies at its disposal.
While this has always been true to some extent, it is even more important today, because our media technologies have become so much more powerful.
It is no longer a one-way broadcast medium, everyone now has access to an online printing press that can potentially reach tens of millions of people.
Indeed, the future of marketing starts with publishing, and as such, brands must contribute to the evolution of social media in order to truly socialize media and galvanize communities to create more informed and active markets.
While traditional mass marketing doesn’t vanish, the customary intermediaries whom we relied upon to broadly circulate our messages and intentions are now only part of the media cycle. With the proliferation of social networks and the channels they’ve constructed between people, social graphs are forming dedicated audiences willfully connected through context and interest.
Businesses can now weave social graphs of their own through the creation of social presences within the communities where customers, prospects and those who influence them, are actively sharing, consuming, and seeking relevant content and information. While many companies are just now realizing the immediate benefits of social participation and engagement, the rewards are far richer than the accumulation of followers or fans.
Time and attention are precious commodities and therefore require thoughtful commentary, involvement, contribution, and programming to spark actions and reactions and concurrently earn two-way alliances that ultimately form the relationships businesses need to cultivate communities and also inspire advocacy.
In Web 1.0, it was said that content was king. In social media, one could argue that context is now king, supported by a royal court of content producers and connectors united by a common desire to share information with purpose and utility.
In social media, content and context are packaged as social objects and they serve as the catalysts for conversation, intelligence, and sharing, and hopefully, word of mouth.
Essentially, social objects are the thoughtful blog posts we publish, the relevant updates we Tweet, the helpful tips we leave for others when they check-in, the useful videos we broadcast, the telling pictures we post, the constructive comments we voice, as well as every other pertinent message we syndicate throughout the statusphere.
Newton’s third law of motion states that every action has a reaction equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.
With every social object we introduce, we merit an entitled response, which either validates or discredits the strategy and work that introduced and propelled our content online. The cause and effect of our objective and outcome are dictated by our mission and purpose. Social objects represent the voice, personality, and design of brands and also reflect the culture and virtues we hope to embody and convey. As a result, social objects can trigger the creation and proliferation of earned media, user-generated content that fortifies and spreads our story to each respective social network and enlivens interaction among desirable social graphs. The goal is to incite reactions that potentially further the social effect.
Social Objects can take the form of a myriad of other conversation catalysts including…
Earned media is the result of our owned, paid, and participatory media programs and is reflected in the blog posts, tweets, status updates, comments, and ultimately actions of our consumers, peers, and influencers. Earned media is ideally linked to owned media campaigns as well as proactive initiatives that attempt to incite viral and word of mouth activity.
Owned Media – media that is essentially, controlled by the brand. Owned objects are social objects produced by the company and introduced to each network in a variety of formats, text, video, audio, experiences, etc.
Paid Media represents the visibility we purchase, such as display ads, paid search, and sponsorships. When paired with owned and earned media programs, paid media serves as a hub for complementing, reinforcing, and polishing brand voice, directives, mission, and stature. While many argue over the future and fate of advertising, what’s clear is that online paid presences can benefit initiatives where action and experiences are defined and promoted through the click path.
Participatory Media – Representing an extension of earned and owned media, participatory media takes the shape of a hosted hub where brand representatives and our communities can interact and collaborate. Go-to examples usually include Dell’s IdeaStorm and Starbuck’s “My Idea” network which resemble branded wikis designed to elicit responses, dictate direction, establish community-focused governances, etc. Participatory media equalizes the balance of power, providing a dedicated platform the gives voice to the consumer and a channel for their ideas to trigger transformation or change.
Sponsored Media - This new category fuses owned, paid, and earned media. Sponsored media is one that is championed by companies such as Izea, MyLikes, Ad.ly, Twittad, among others and is creating a new medium for packaging messages through trusted voices within highly visible and social channels. Sponsored media can take the form of paid tweets, blog posts, appearances, and featured objects on targeted profiles. And, whether you agree or disagree with the idea, the reality is that they work and they seem to benefit all parties involved, from brand to paid affiliates to their communities
Businesses are presented with a unique moment in time through interactive technologies to directly capture the attention of their audiences and ultimately stakeholders, through the creation, propagation, and connection of these social objects. However, access to new, expansive, and dynamic platforms does not guarantee our ability to earn and captivate audiences. Our ability to connect and reconnect is driven by our understanding of the unique needs and requirements of those consumers defining our markets and our mastery of the tools and services that form parallel contextual networks.
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Article originally posted at HubSpot
The text of the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was finally released to the public yesterday. We welcome the official release of the ACTA text after two years of negotiations. We can now have a serious public debate about its content and far-reaching impact on citizens' lives.
If the previous leaks (here, here, here and here) left any doubt, the officially released text makes it crystal clear that ACTA is not just about counterfeiting. When ACTA was announced two years ago, it was portrayed as a modest effort at increasing coordination between customs agencies tracking counterfeit physical goods. The officially released text shows that it's far broader. First, it is not just about trademarks; it covers copyright, potentially patents, and all other forms of intellectual property. Second, it's not just about physical goods. It's all about the Internet — which it targets very specifically — and citizens' ability to use it to communicate, collaborate and create. ACTA contains new potential obligations for Internet intermediaries, requiring them to police the Internet and their users, which in turn pose significant concerns for citizens' privacy, freedom of expression and fair use rights.
Read on for our preliminary analysis on copyright issues.
"If the previous leaks (here, here, here and here) left any doubt, the officially released text makes it crystal clear that ACTA is not just about counterfeiting. When ACTA was announced two years ago, it was portrayed as a modest effort at increasing coordination between customs agencies tracking counterfeit physical goods. The officially released text shows that it's far broader. First, it is not just about trademarks; it covers copyright, potentially patents, and all other forms of intellectual property. Second, it's not just about physical goods. It's all about the Internet — which it targets very specifically — and citizens' ability to use it to communicate, collaborate and create. ACTA contains new potential obligations for Internet intermediaries, requiring them to police the Internet and their users, which in turn pose significant concerns for citizens' privacy, freedom of expression and fair use rights."
- Miguel CaetanoThe Parties shall also ensure that right holders are in a position to apply for an injuction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right.Talk about a massive increase in secondary liability -- something that negotiators have insisted was not in ACTA and that we were all crazy to suggest it. Note that there are no caveats here. No limitation if there are substantial non-infringing uses. And, it even goes beyond direct liability to allowing an injunction against third parties. This clause would outlaw Google. Thankfully, New Zealand specifically has come out against this proposal and Canada questions the statutory limitations.
Each Party shall provide that its judicial authorities shall have the authority, at the request of the applicant, to issue an interlocutory injunction intended to prevent any imminent infringement of an intellectual property right.Yup, you got that right. They want to let anyone block the possibility of future infringement. That goes way beyond the law today, and reaches into "pre-crime" scenarios out of Minority Report.
