Came across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it’s not enforceable!
Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:
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.
Given the recent kerfuffle on Facebook over pictures of breastfeeding mothers, perhaps they should send it to Mark Zuckerberg…