Data as speech: we could become our own censors, in the name of privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published on its site this week a proposal for “A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users.”

After Facebook (numerous) privacy policy changes which occurred recently, and the recent report in The Wall Street Journal that advertising companies were receiving information from Facebook and MySpace that could be then used to look up individual profiles, we certainly need to reassess the rights of social media users.

As a privacy advocate, I certainly applaud the proposed EFF bill of privacy rights. Privacy needs to be protected, especially online. It seems that social media users also need to be protected from themselves, and the right to delete embarrassing picture is certainly appealing.

But if I wear my First Amendment advocate hat, number 3 on the bill of privacy rights, The Right to Leave, does not seem to be such a good idea.

The author of the Bill, Kurt Opsahl, summarizes point 3 in this formula: “Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away."Social media users should have “the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service.”

If I delete my data, should I have the right to take everything with me, including what I have posted on a friend’s wall? This is data, sure, but it is also speech after all.

I am not sure if the bill of privacy rights would cover only personal data. Point 3 refers to “data” or “uploaded information.” It could mean only personal data, but it could also mean all the information I have posted on social media sites, whether on my page, or on other’s people’s page. If the user chose to delete all of the information she uploaded over time on the social network, doesn’t this give her a right to censor other people speech?

Should we have a right to be forgotten online? Of course, we have the right to change opinion, anytime. You know how the saying goes, “Only stupid people never change their opinion,” and it is quite true. Having an opinion is one of the most difficult things one can achieve, and informing oneself, weighting different aspects of an issue, making a decision, should not be a process set in stone. A new piece of information, a new technology, a new event, may entice us to change opinion.

And we have opinions about just anything, right? Let’s just say I wrote years ago on my BFF’s Facebook wall: “I just so love kittens and sunsets on the beach!” Well, I have since changed my mind, and I now make a living in Alaska raising dogs. My formerly-professed love of kittens could damage my professional reputation.

This is just an opinion, and it is not defamatory, just maybe embarrassing for me. Should I be able to take these comments away, when I leave the site? What if my BFF had answered me: ”I love them too !” Her comment is now left tangling in cyberspace…

And should this Bill of Privacy Rights also apply to Twitter? Actually, that would be impossible right now, as Twitter has donated its entire archive of tweets to the Library of Congress.

According to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington: "The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life. (...) The collection also documents a remarkable range of social trends. Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material."

Our tweets are valuable speech indeed, and even the most mundane of tweets (aka the infamous what-I-ate-for-lunch tweet) could have great importance in the future.OK, so maybe Twitter is not a traditional social network site, and may be better defined as a micro-blogging, everything-is-public site, but it has a lot of social networking aspects.It also has been used, and probably will be used again, by eye witnesses to report important events instantly. Should they later be allowed to take this data away?

Should we have a right to be forgotten online? There is a bill recently introduced in the House that would allow us to be forgotten online. H.R.5108, the Cyber Privacy Act Bill, would “require certain Internet websites that contain personal information of individual's to remove such information at the request of such individuals.” The Act would define “personal information” as “any information about an individual that includes, at minimum, the individual's name together with either a telephone number of such individual or an address of such individual”.

The sponsors of this bill probably have in mind the protection of privacy, again, a very worthy cause! However, couldn’t this bill, if enacted, be used to have one’s name deleted from a message we have posted? (I love kittens, signed Jane Smith)