Law in the Internet Society

View   r7  >  r6  ...
BrettJohnsonFirstPaper 7 - 22 Nov 2009 - Main.JustinColannino
Line: 1 to 1
 
META TOPICPARENT name="FirstPaper"
Comments from anyone are welcome and appreciated.
Line: 66 to 66
 The paper reads well. In terms of suggestions, I have only a few. First, you should link to Steven Wu's essay in discussing that some people choose aggregation in return for customized services. You might also look at Dana Delger's essay in that regard. I tend to agree that an opt-in system is the best approach, for the reasons you outline: those who wish to sign-up for data aggregation should be allowed to do so, and free-for-all monitoring is highly problematic. If I were to suggest revision to the essay, I would think saying more about just what sort of information people must be given when deciding to opt-in or not would be helpful. You don't want the opt-in option to be like the Windows Vista User Access Control, but you need it to also not overload the user with info (as you suggest). Maybe on the federal site you mention, you could also have a sort of opt-in wiki? Where people can post and discuss the results of their opting-in and out. The initial opt-in/out button gives essential, basic info (just a few sentences), and the link takes you to the federal page and a wiki where you can learn more? Whatever the optimal opt-in model, I think saying more about ideas for it would be helpful. Otherwise, it looks pretty good.

-- BrianS - 20 Nov 2009

Added:
>
>
Brett,

I have a two suggestions, one on style and two on substance.

First, rolling links into words instead of having them stand alone in the text would make the paper flow more smoothly in some instances. To place a link you can use this syntax:

[[LINK][LINK TEXT]]
So if I wanted "Google" to hyperlink to www.google.com I would use the above syntax with:
LINK = http://www.google.com 
LINK TEXT = Google
So for example, if you wanted to put a link into this sentience: All three components of privacy and in particular autonomy are intertwined with personal freedom. http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/03/freedom-and-autonomy.html.

You could change it to this: All three components of privacy and in particular autonomy are intertwined with personal freedom.

Second, although I agree that opt-in is better than the current system, I find this draft confusing as to why you think so. In section II you introduce five different privacy options: "absolutely prohibiting data mining, unlimited and unregulated data mining, opt-in, nakedness, and opt out systems." You then proceed to reject four out of the five and thus accept the fifth one as "the best chance" for privacy. But you've said nothing about the merits of opt-in at all. Its like if I had 4 rocks and threw them at 5 targets and concluded that the one target I did not hit was unable to be hit by rocks. I think your proposal for legislation might be bolstered by spending the space on what is good about opt-in instead of what is bad about the other options.

Finally, I think that if you have the space you may want to try to address some of the counter arguments to your proposed legislation. If Google cannot store any data about searches, are we prohibiting Google from knowing something that happened to it? Does this have First Amendment implications? Will your proposed legislation prevent me from keeping a log of the visitors who come to my personal website? Another objection is that it prevents Google from protecting itself. Servers can be attacked through many different methods. A DDoS attack is an attack where many computers send millions of requests for information (for example, sending a search request to Google) to the same server with the goal of overloading the server and taking it offline. These attacks often target sites like Google and Twitter. One way of surviving the attack is to identify the computers sending the requests and stop accepting requests from those computers. Your legislation would prohibit Google from identifying who is attacking their computers and to take measures to prevent the attack from succeeding.

-- JustinColannino - 22 Nov 2009

 
 
<--/commentPlugin-->

Revision 7r7 - 22 Nov 2009 - 16:53:47 - JustinColannino
Revision 6r6 - 20 Nov 2009 - 08:19:18 - BrianS
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM