After last week’s user rebellion that upended Facebook’s attempt to change its terms of service to grant itself a perpetual license to all photos, videos and copyrighted material posted by its members — somehow, Terms of Use Rebellion doesn’t have the same historical ring as Whiskey Rebellion — the company is angling to turn the incident into a net positive by calling on its users to help formulate a “bill of rights” to govern the social-networking giant.
It’s a bold, gutsy and unprecedented move, the kind of envelope-pushing move we’ve seen in the past from founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The proposed Facebook Principles cover topics such as the “freedom to share and connect,” privacy rights, “fundamental equality” and “ownership and control of information.” Facebook users — there are about 175 million of us around the globe — are being invited to review, comment on and ultimately vote on the proposals in “a virtual town hall” over the next 30 days.
If more than 7,000 users comment on any proposed change, it would go to a vote. Trouble is, they’ve intentionally set the bar impossibly high. The measures would be binding to Facebook only if more than 30 percent of active users vote. Based on Facebook’s current size, that would be nearly 53 million people. By comparison, a group created to protest Facebook’s new terms has roughly 139,600 members. (I’m one of them.)
I’ve also joined these groups (and encourage you to consider doing likewise), which are still quite small:
• Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (88,410 members)
• Facebook Town Hall: Proposed Facebook Principles (9,331 members)
• Facebook Town Hall: Proposed Statement of Rights & Responsibilities (8,548 members — these group names are too similar, in my view)
Here’s what I wrote back on Sept. 7, 2007, about a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web:
At Office 2.0 yesterday I heard about this significant announcement: A Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web put out by four Web 2.0 pioneers: Marc Canter (who co-founded Ourmedia with me); uber-blogger Robert Scoble; Joseph Marc, the head tech guy at social networking company Plaxo; and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. It’s short and sweet:
We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
User control of their own data. The right to bring it over to other networks. The right to remove your stuff permanently. The Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web laid out these principles clearly. Now it’s time to work with and pressure companies — with Facebook at the front of the pack — to live up to these common-sense standards.
More:
• Stowe Boyd: An Open Letter On Best Practices And Principles
• Marc Canter: Facebook is gradually getting there
• jill/txt: [facebook democratisation: the balance between community and business]
• Facebook press release: Facebook Opens Governance of Service and Policy Process to Users
• San Jose Mercury News: Facebook to create ‘bill of rights’
• Associated Press: Facebook to let users give input on policies
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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