Web companies should practice ' Data Stewardship '-PCWorld

People are talking about privacy here at South by Southwest. Generally, Facebook has played fast and loose with the protection of our personal data, and this has raised the interest in question among developers, many of whom develop programs that is intrin Illustration: Jeffrey Pelosically social. There is also a sense that we are better able to make personal information. But we might need a new way of thinking and talking about it.

A Friday panel here discusses a "social network users ' Bill of Rights" would contain a number of protections for users of social networking sites. (You can read the Twitter stream of the event here.) One of the major themes of the discussion was the idea that we are in a very real sense, pay-to-use free services like Facebook and Google by sacrificing some of our personal information. If we start to refuse to hand over our data, or deny social network Web sites the right to use it, can we find ourselves having to pay for use on Web sites.

If there are issues, which are more sensitive among internet users than their personal integrity, is the prospect of having to pay. We are trained to expect "free" on the Internet, and we do not want to change.

Have I am thinking this personal thing again at the latest. I have looked at it not with regard to the protection of personal information, but in the form of personal information on social networks, ad networks and data brokers who used to earn money "cash".

I think first of all, it is the word "Privacy" has become a politically charged term, loaded. I think the collection and use of personal data can have two different results--a beneficial and other coercive measures and potentially harmful. Company a was able to study my personal and friend data and deliver ads to me, is worth looking at and not just random garbage. Company B, on the other hand, can collect my personal, sensitive information, go out of business, and then allow my data and data of millions of others to fall into the hands of people who want to use it on unscrupulous or illegal ways.

Data collected by the social Web sites do not seem to die easily, and can live on after the company collected it is deleted. I think we need a set of rules, which talk about stewardship responsibility both web companies today and in the future. We need rules that apply directly to the Web-the companies themselves, and not so much a vague set of privacy rules concerning consumers. We must, for example, explicit rules about what the Internet companies must do with a person's personal data when the user exits the Web site or even die (this is actually a big problem).

Social network companies Facebook and Google would like to define rules and police even in private life, without a law. But as USC law professor Jack Lerner points out, we have laws on almost every other kind of data--financial data and health care data, for example--but not about the information in the social graph.

I believe that we need a law, and which has international reach (although I am sure, how you do it), because the Internet knows no borders. But I believe that the new law should focus on data stewardship responsibility of Internet companies.

Senators John McCain and John Kerry, is said to circulate an online privacy Bill, which would require companies to get permission from users to collect personal data and allow users to see exactly which data has already been collected. The potential legislation be taken more seriously than in the past, similar attempt because the two sponsors--each a senior member of his party--represents a bipartisan effort that has a chance to win broad support. On the other hand, this pair of promoted privacy legislation for a period of at least ten years.

I hope they get it right, because the law will tone in the way sites like Facebook and Google (and a host of other "social marketing" and online advertising companies) treat our personal information well into the future.

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