April 16, 2007

Tangled Web: be wary of MySpace and other online social networks

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:01AM

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So your life's online now? With each click pitfalls await.

I won't rant about newfangled online social network websites making our nation's youth more vulnerable to predators. Fact: adults supervising teens in real life are more likely to abuse them than are random people online, and there's no cases linking participation in these sites with actual harm from sexual predators (in fact myspace has been used to catch ne'er-do-wells, but that's another story).

But what about harm from people with power over you, who don't care about your liberty?

Here's the trouble with MySpace: the more you expand your social life and public face into online situations, the more you lose certain rights in those virtual venues.

Young people are more likely to be engaged in online social networks, so it's key that we question who's pulling the strings.

So here's my list of Reasons To Be Wary of MySpace:

1. It's not private -- in the sense that whatever is on there can be used against you.

   The hardest thing for a lot of kids to absorb is that stuff you post on MySpace can be taken out of context. You may think it's funny, part of a private conversation that's in jest, made-up, or exaggerated, but that picture or quip you upload can be also be viewed by someone with power to punish you for it. This can be the teacher you're mocking on your MySpace blog or a potential employer, or the police who are interested in what they think are threats.

2. Along with being searchable by individuals like those above, MySpace's policies are compatible with parental (for now) spyware, which could be used for a variety of purposes.

3. MySpace is not public -- in the sense that you don't have any constitutional rights like you would in physical public spaces like a library or park. You have no freedom of speech. You have no freedom to associate. Any appeals over behavior are to a totally private organization with few overseers.

4. The appeals are further limited because the End User License Agreement (the contract you have to agree to in order to join) also allows that MySpace can change how it works without warning or consent: it's your responsibility to check up on the website -- they won't actively notify you of the changes. Like when the ability to fastforward through the songs on the MySpace music player suddenly disappeared? What a pain. Was there any chance for public input?

5. This is true for their privacy policy as well: "If, however, we are going to use users' personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify by posting a notice on our Web site for 30 days."

6. MySpace also disabled the use of programs that allow you to really customize your homepage, if those widgets "engage in commercial activity", although most commonly products are blocked if they "compete directly with MySpace's own offerings".

7. Myspace is not only privately owned, it's owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox Network, IGN, Fuel TV), who assert conservative political and worldviews, and who profit from your participation.

8. And a poor omen for our rights to parody, comment on, or mashup culture: The Chief Security Officer as of April 26 2006, is the former Anti-Piracy enforcer for the notoriously litigious (and anti-fair use) Motion Picture Association of America.

Initially, I was going to write this critique of MySpace and offer you some alternatives. But as I read various other online social network site's EULAs, I realized that the first point is the key one. When you join a private institution, you have very few rights against it. Just because the experience is something analogous to being in a public or semi-public space, doesn't mean the law will back you up. If we want our legal rights to be protected in places that are "used as" public spaces, we're going to need a substantial shift in the way courts understand online activity.

More specifically, EULAs are long and boring for a reason! They hedge the interests of the site owners even further. For folks who will put in the effort, great: read EULAs carefully with questions about the above issues in mind.

So, in terms of user rights, is FaceBook any different than Tribe?

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, most online social network sites EULAs are not much different from MySpace's, and their privacy policies are maybe marginally better phrased.

My main recommendation may be that they are not going to directly profit notoriously right-wing News Corp, but everything else still depends on their EULAs and Privacy Policies.

Unfortunately, just because other companies sound nice doesn't mean they have to be nice. For example: William Dyson's adelph.us calls itself the "socially responsible" site, and yet it doesn't even have a EULA or a privacy policy. If you join up, you don't even get an unfair contract to hold them to!

While the above and MySpace might be somewhat deceptive, many others are more forthcoming (note: I am not a lawyer, my reading of these licenses is alert but likely far more generous than a skilled lawyer on the opposing side would be):

Multiply has a very forcefully stated privacy policy, which might be reassuring, or at least might be of some use in a dispute.

Vox, run by SixApart has a comparable privacy policy.

Bebo, which outpaced MySpace in England, also appears comparable.

Tribe's privacy policy seems comparable to MySpace, and most interestingly asserts they are a licensee of an independent, non-profit organization called the TRUSTe Privacy Program, whose mission is to establish trusting relationships based on respect for personal identity and information by promoting the use of fair information practices.

But there's no shortcut to protecting your rights online -- it takes a lot of reading, and a lot of defensiveness. This is a problem: most people won't take the time and even if they do they may not see the implications of legalese that someone hired a lawyer to construct. Does this mean most people should give up all rights to be present in online social spaces?

Maybe we should all start working on the proposal for a social network bill of rights.

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For a longer and more wide-ranging article on these issues, don't forget to check out Cory Doctorow's latest piece on similar issues. In his phrasing, businesses are in essence dictatorships to the extent that you are required to (or locked in to) deal with them. So much for capitalism and democracy..