Social Media User’s Bill of Rights, Take 2
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 by Mary HodderI’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about the Social Media User’s Bill of Rights I blogged about the other day.
I said then that I quibbled with the “ownership” model for user’s data. That maybe it should read “co-ownership.”
Well after thinking it through, in different scenarios, and talking with people at the Data Sharing Summit over the weekend, and a couple of our advisors, I’ve decided that it makes more sense for users to:
1. own their data, solely
2. give a non-exclusive license to Dabble when they put data at our site.
3. be able to remove the data, to the extent that we can take it out (backup tapes are problematic but we’ll do our best)
4. part of the non-exclusive license to Dabble will include that we can distribute the data (RSS feeds, etc) about the user’s activities.
Web20, etc. (I still hate that term but I’m mellowing a bit) won’t work unless we do this as a complete package, because users need, if they are using someone else’s site, to be able to share data, make it searchable elsewhere, make it reusable and remixable, depending on the data. But they also need to know they have control over it. And sites like ours need to architect with this understanding.
For example, if I join Dabble and make playlists and collect videos, I can remove them as I please. In addition, I can remove my account any time I want. We’ll remove everything we can, but exceptions might include backup tapes stored away.
Anyway, I know this is a slight (maybe semantic) shift, but I think it matters, gives users more control, and makes the partnership between the user and Dabble which hosts functionality and activities more clear, more accountable, and more fair.
I think it’s the right thing to do. And so we’re taking steps to make a slight change to the Dabble Privacy and Data Policy to reflect this. It should be there shortly.