SXSW: Vote on your 'Social Network Users' Bill of Rights'

It's been kicked around for years, but the idea for a social media "Bill of Rights" started gaining traction about a year ago, when user privacy really hit the fan. Why's that, you ask?

Speaking on the "Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights" panel Friday at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Jack Lerner,  assistant professor at USC Law School, told the tale of Facebook and Google’s privacy controversies circa spring, 2010.

"These were pretty prominent breaches," Lerner said. "Facebook unilaterally changed privacy practices and did it in a way that were insulting to users," removing interests and personal information out of user control, and added the difficult-to-opt-out of instant personalization. "At at the same time, Google Buzz released peoples’ top e-mail contacts. The public has a very strong expectation of privacy in e-mail. It was a deep breach of public trust."

Following the breaches, privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, raised a ruckus. Facebook rolled back the privacy changes and Google Buzz stopped sharing. But this wasn’t the first time Internet users had their privacy yanked with little to no say in the matter. So last year, technology and privacy constituencies met at the 21st Century at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in San Jose, Calif., and emerged with a draft you’re now invited to vote on. Here it is, the  "Social Media 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.

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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.

"These are natural rights," said panelist Lisa Borodkin, an Internet attorney and co-host of the web series TechZulu Law (with fellow panelist Christina Gagnier, intellectual property and tech attorney, Gagnier Margossian LLP).

"Pretend you live in a world absence of terms of use," Borodkin continued, eliciting more than a few hearty guffaws. Terms of use are those dense disclaimers none of us read, and once we’ve agreed to them, we have little recourse.

The hope is that this "Bill of Rights"can help that change. The initial draft opened up a conversation between Facebook and the ACLU. The next step in the debate is to have the public vote on it, which you can do on Facebook now until June 15, 2011. As the official #BillofRights Facebook page points out, this is the anniversary of the date the U.S. government asked Twitter to delay its scheduled server maintenance as a critical communication tool for use in the 2009 Iran elections. It emphasizes just how important social media has become.

As the panel drew to a close, it wasn’t really clear what firm action could come from this nonbinding "Bill of Rights." But if you’re not an Internet attorney or law scholar, this is a good start when it comes to wrapping your head around the complicated issue of privacy and social network rights. And it sure beats whining about Facebook in your status updates. For more information,

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Helen A.S. Popkin is not a tech attorney or privacy scholar or really very bright at all, but she is at SXSWi, going blah blah blah about Internet privacy and stuff geeks like, and also working very hard, as you (and Helen's boss) can clearly ascertain via Facebook and Twitter.