An examination of identity rights agreement paradigms (along with much anti-lawyer sentiment) was fostered by Drummond Reed and Phil Windley at the Internet Identity Workshop. Highlights included:
Creative Commons developed license agreements in simple language, and formally articulated the casual licensing that had become a web norm. In other systems, an informal relationship between two parties is enough. What will be needed in the new identity commons?
It's hard to start articulating legal responsibilities when we haven't yet articulated user requirements for privacy. What are reasonable user policies? What are the international boundary transitions? Windley stepped up to the whiteboard in order to work up an outline for suggested user policies:
- Broadcast freely
- Share with others under the same agreement umbrella as you
- Use content for a specific duration, until revoked, or forever
- Use once and destroy
- Permissions are limited to just one of read/write/transmit
- Parties could include you, related purposes, affiliates, and the public viewer
Each one of these categories can spawn lists upon lists of options. How many of these lists do we need to keep? The shorter the list, with the more concrete variables , the more likely it is to be adopted. This implies that we need a standard way of responding to issues and establishing contracts. Also, it's important to note that policies like these aren't synonomous with permission and authorization. These policies represent social agreements, which may become legal, and should be accounted for in reputation systems.
If someone breaks my as-yet-undefined identity rights contract, I can either contact a lawyer or give that person negative feedback towards their reputation. There haven't been many other ideas developed yet, so Windley suggests that interested parties go to the identityrights.org wiki in order to share proposals on how to handle contract breaches. The community also needs to address issues such as: As a user, how do I manage several groups of data that are subject to different contracts? Is this list of guidelines something that is proactively enforced, or something that is referred to only when complaints arise?
Unsurprisingly, we ran out of time before coming to good resolution on these issues...look for the dialogue to continue.
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