privacy

First of all, welcome to our new readers!  We had a great time at SXSW introducing ourselves and CDT to a new audience that's as excited as we are about keeping the Internet the awesome place that it is. Take some time to look around and read up on all the issues that matter to you.

Adam Rosenberg and I absorbed ourselves in some enlightening panels and got a chance to hobnob with a few tech world titans. Here's a list of all of our SXSWi 2010 coverage:

Recently, Cyrus and I returned from a five-day trip to Austin, TX for SXSW Interactive.  As we stated before, locational-data apps like GoWalla and Foursquare were literally the lifeblood of the entire conference with people using them to figure out what events were worth attending and where their friends were.

We used these apps for the entire conference and by the final day I was, well, a little bit “over” the whole oversharing thing.  It was actually somewhat of a challenge for me to be a social media coordinator (where the essence of social media is connecting and sharing information with new people) but also be a privacy advocate and preach moderation.  That’s for another blog post though.  For now, check out this video we put together on what happens after five days of oversharing data at SXSW:

The FCC makes a strong statement in its National Broadband Plan (NBP) that increasing consumer trust and truly achieving the potential of broadband requires a solid national privacy framework. The plan details the privacy concerns that must be addressed as education, health care, voting, and energy move online, and emphasizes the importance of integrating privacy protections into the adoption of these services. We hope the FCC’s comprehensive and farsighted view of privacy, and its emphasis on the need to ensure that privacy protections and considerations are incorporated into exciting new online services, resonates throughout the government and the corporate world.

danah boyd (no, my shift key isn't broken), a Microsoft researcher and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center, delivered the opening keynote at SXSW today. To no one's surprise, it was a thought provoking address.

boyd posited that privacy, contrary to some opinion, is NOT dead. It's simply more complicated than we realize. boyd suggested that there is a prevailing thought that privacy is a binary choice - that one chooses to give away all of their information, or chooses to be an online hermit. The truth of the matter is closer to real life interactions, where we have certain expectations about where the information we give to our peers will go.

Stating an opinion among a group of friends is not something that many people have a problem with. If that opinion is spread around, either through friends or by the amplification that is the hallmark of social aggregators, it can pierce the bubble of your small circle of friends, becoming fair game to any and all.

Privacy, boyd said, is really all about control. In real life, we share personally identifiable information as well as "personally embarrassing information," as boyd put it, with our friends, but we choose not to shout this information in front of every one of our social circles. "Wanting privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about wanting control," she said. The public-by-default paradigm is not "the great democratizer" as social media companies presumed it would be - it's only served to violate users' privacy expectations.

We are happy to report that a key committee of the Maine Legislature has voted to repeal the problematic marketing to minors law Chapter 230 that the Legislature passed last fall.  That law would have dramatically censored lawful online speech about minors, and would have curtailed Maine minors’ ability to access popular social networks and other online content, violating their First Amendment rights. 

In addition to voting to repeal Chapter 230, the Joint Business, Research, and Economic Development Committee also decided to refrain from passing any additional legislation in its place.  This represents a significant turn-around for the Committee.  Previous drafts of LD 1677 more narrowly target predatory drug marketing practices aimed at young teens, but they continued to suffer from First Amendment and Commerce Clause defects.  Last week’s amendments still raised real concerns over the ability of ad-based websites and services, including Gmail, Facebook, and WebMD, to offer information and access to minors, and satisfactory revisions to the bill were difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.