Like I have talked about before with Google, Laurance Lessig discussed in his talk at the University of Washington, public companies are established with one goal. That is to earn increasing amounts of money for their shareholders. His talk was entitled “Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)” and discussed a variety of topics that boiled down to the license terms that Google and Facebook are using in their API licensing are far beyond what would have been tolerated from Microsoft some ten years ago. What are these terms?
- Termination of service for any reason or for speaking poorly of Google/Facebook
- Ability to arbitrary set prices at any time
- Etc
He had clips from their license agreements illustrating these points and continually asked about Microsoft during their anti-trust case “..would this behavior have been tolerated from Microsoft?” Clearly his implication was that it would not and that, as these API platforms become more prevalent, and they begin to act in their own interests to protect their businesses and increase their profitability as is the base purpose of the construct called the corporation, they will be in position to act even more effectively to stifle their competition and squeeze their partners. Holding the data level should prove to be more powerful than the operating system and application level due to the internet serving in greater and greater amounts as the application itself. He went further in his talk here in that he stated that the law industry needs to acknowledge that actually using Fair Use is insane and unworkable. He continued along these lines in that new media, read-write media as he puts it below is collaborative and ignoring the byzantine notions of fair use. He has an interesting argument about the radicalization of media and how if the gap isn’t closed, the revolutionaries will overwhelm. There are plenty of examples all over the internet: 
When the majority of traffic on the internet is bittorrent traffic, when there is Pirate Party groups gaining support all over the world, it’s hard to ignore his advice to find a better way to manage media and patent rights. The latter Q&A was pretty interesting as well. However, as with most talks like this, it doesn’t actually make any suggestions on how to change things as they are, but just to make more use of the Creative Commons license to enable this RW cultural revolution.
Does this go far enough? I have my doubts.
In addition, there has been some interesting movement with Facebook. Through the use of their “Beacon for Social Distribution,” as mentioned in their blog posting, Facebook is now posting to your profile things you do on other websites if you signed up with the same email address. It can be disabled at a later time in your external websites privacy settings, but users opt-in by default. Only when the data has been shared are you able to discontinue usage.
There has been a lot of discussion about it, and much of it is not positive. Unwanted functionality and, what I would call, data promiscuity has already been approached in all of the previous industries. Slamming in the long distance telephone industry, the do-not-call list for telemarketers, and lately a proposed do-not-track registry.
These practices are almost a plea for regulation. The usual suspects have the usual things to say about policing consumer/user data about how the industry polices itself.
Without a dollar figure attached to policing, there is not any real incentive to do so, but rather just to not get caught. Really this is only about American consumers as some countries in Asia and most of Europe have protections for their citizens. A good primer for some of these rules would be the Safe Harbor guidelines for enforcement of an “adequate standard for privacy protection.” I do not plan on retreating to my cave just yet. I realize that most of the privacy I cultivated for myself is pretty much gone and that most of us now have to act like a celebrity in case you will be outed by data corroboration.
Want an example? Take the example of this Valleywag article that mentions a bank intern being embarrassed in front of the entire office for flaking out on work. This may be your future even if you don’t use social networking sites yourself. Interesting times call for thoughtful and tricky solutions to these challenges.
Give it some thought.
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