Intellectual Property Law

Colbert's Word: Control-Self-Delete

By hugh

Just a few weeks after his interview with EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn, American hero Stephen Colbert has returned to the subject of digital rights. And he's come up with a great solution to the problem of privacy and online social networks: Control-Self-Delete.

As Colbert suggests, the CEOs of Google and Facebook can be astonishingly tone deaf when it comes to the question of the privacy of their customers. As these experts in social media ought to know, the fact that a person chooses to share some information about themselves online is no indication that they prefer to share everything ? nor does it indicate that control of personal data is not something they care deeply about. Study after study has shown the opposite to be true: users care about privacy, and demand control of their own data.

We like Colbert's basic point, saved for the end of this clip: if anyone should change their behavior to address the problem of online privacy, it isn't young people who have uploaded some racy pics ? it's the companies that have made themselves the guardians of our personal data.

Full post as published by Electronic Freedom Foundation - Deep Links on August 26, 2010 (boomark / email).