Everyone is a publisher
Talk Overview
- Three major public policy challenges of the Web: Freedom of expression, copyright, and privacy
- Learning from successes and failures in addressing these challenges
- Detailed look at Privacy
- US Law: sectoral regulation and contracts
- EU Data Protection Law: Human rights and regulations
- Crytography to the rescue
- Limitations of current privacy approaches
- Reminder of the role of Law and Society
- Toward clear rules and accountable systems
- Conclusion
Policy challenge -- Socially-unacceptable content
Time Magazine, 3 July 1995
A New Approach
| "The Internet is 'a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human
communication.'" ACLU v. Reno, United States Supreme Court (June 1997)
"Filters are less restrictive than COPA. They impose selective
restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal
restrictions at the source." Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 US 654 (2004).
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Policy challenge -- Intellectual Property Protection: DRM vs. Fair Use
Salon Magazine, 30-3-2005
From DRM to Open Source/Open Access
"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music,"
Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Music (February 6, 2007)
Experience from Web Policy Challenges
"When We're All Publishers"
Policy Challenge |
Failed Centralized Approach |
Successful Decentralized Approach |
| Freedom of Expression/Inappropriate Content |
Broadcast-style censorship |
User-side Filtering |
| Copyright |
Digital Rights Management |
Open source business models |
| Privacy |
Secrecy |
? |
A Privacy Conundruum
Jerrigan and Mistree (2007), unpublished research
Characteristics of Today's Privacy Challenge
- Lots of personal information data
- held by lots of parties
- huge increase in analytic capacity and data integration techniques
- little time and attention to manage uses
- unclear rules when data crosses boundaries
Web Privacy Challenges From Traditional Perspectives
- US Law: Sectoral regulation with contractual freedom and common law in the general case
- EU Data Protection: Human rights protected through regulation
- Technical: Cryptographic protection of secrets
US Law: Sectoral regulation with contractual freedom in the general case
Targetted Sector-specific Privacy Protections
- Health Infomration
- Banking
- Financial Profile
- Insurance
- Genetic Non-Discrimination
- Video rental records :-)
General right of consumer fairness and reliance on individual negoation ('let the marketplace work')
EU Data Protection: Human rights protected through regulation
Article 6
1. Member States shall provide that personal data must be:
(a) processed fairly and lawfully;
(b) collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a way incompatible with those purposes....
(c) adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and/or further processed;
(d) accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; .... (e) kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data were collected or for which they are further processed....
Directive 95/46/EC
The Challenge of Consent and purpose limitations
Can today's privacy model (EU or US) be sufficient going forward?
Key will be purpose limitation, but we have a dilemma...
- narrow purpose definition -> lots of choices = large time investment
will yield privacy protection and low flexibility
- broad purpose limitation -> few choices = small time investment
required but less control and less privacy protection
Dilemma: limited individual and regulatory capacity to
control escalating data collection.
Current result of consent dilemma +
increased inference power: strict about what's collected but loose about
usage
Better result: loose about what is
collected and strict about usage
Technical: Cryptographic protection of secrets
Anonymity -- the key to privacy?
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Recap: Limitations of traditional privacy approaches
- high transaction costs to negotiation
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- inappropriate fit between 'everyone' publishing and regulatory processes better suited to large 'data controllers'
- people don't want to keep everything completely secret
Reminder of the Role of Law and Society...
- How many believe you are subject to law (any law)?
- How many of you follow (most) laws? [exclude speed limits]
- How many of you read all the laws to which you believe you are
subject?
- How many have been to a court of law?
Order without Law
Open vs. Closed Range -- What are the Rules?
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Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law (1991)
Privacy Re-Defined - Saltzer and Schroeder revisited
Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to used by others.
Information Accountability Through Policy Aware Systems
A new approach to Privacy, Copyright and Freedom of Expression
Information Accountability: When information has been used, it should to possible to determine what happened, and to pinpoint use that is inappropriate
Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler, Sussman, Information Accountability,
Communications of the ACM,
June 2008, 82-87
Accountable Copyright Licensing
and non-compliance
Key Features of Accountable Systems
- Flexible information flow
- Designed for decentralized environments
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- Rules are clear to information users and subjects
- Credible threat that violations will be detected
- Better fit as an interface between human community and social rules
Goal: Deter rule violation while preserving free flow of information
More Information
- Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler, Sussman, Information Accountability, Communications of the ACM, Jun. 2008, 82-87.
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- Lalana Kagal, Chris Hanson, and Daniel Weitzner, Integrated Policy Explanations via Dependency Tracking, IEEE Policy 2008
- AIR specifications: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI/2007/AIR/
- How to use the Justification UI http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI/2008/JustificationUI/howto.html
