Follow usHibe and the EFF Bill of Rights for Social Network Users
Following the privacy controversy that rocked the social media world in May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a bill for privacy rights for social network users.
In this post, we will go through the bill and discuss how Hibe complies with it.
#1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making
“Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.”
Hibe: Privacy made simple
As seen in a previous post, Hibe enables you to share information through facets. In a single view, you can review who can see your facets and which booklets you expose in them.
If you set access restrictions (conditions) to one of your facets, it will appear on the same interface.
Because Hibe supports exceptions of various natures, such as “Tom can always access my project booklet”, or “Dad can never see content in my Friend facet”, we have designed a privacy page to summarize all of them in a single interface.
“Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.”
Hibe is offering a simple model. You house your information in a place where you have total control on who can access it. There are no advertisers or so-called “partners” to leech your information.
We just do not grant access to your information to anyone unless you specify it or we are required to do so by law.
“Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.”
We believe that letting you know who accesses your information is part of your right for privacy. If we become under legal obligation to share some of your information, we will notify you unless we are refrained from doing so.
#2: The Right to Control
YOU do the sharing, not us.
“Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data.”
This is our “raison d’être”. We design Hibe to give you full control over who accesses what and under which conditions.
You do the sharing, not us.
“Social network services must ask their users' permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users' data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be "opt-in" by default, not "opt-out," meaning that users' data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it.”
We also believe that too often default values (and opt outs) are used to manipulate people’s behavior. On Hibe, you define the sharing rules of your facets. No services or features can modify these rules. Hibe is about giving you the control; not taking it away.
“If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.”
Our business model is not based on your data. It is based on our ability to provide you with total control over the sharing of your information. Misleading or unclear interfaces brings us no value.
#3: The Right to Leave
“One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service's servers.”
Your trust means more to us than your data. Any information shared through your facets, be it a post or an image will be permanently deleted from our servers on your request.
If you contribute content to a public environment, such as a group, you can no longer delete it as others may interact with it. Similarly, when you contribute art to a public organization, you can not ask for it back. However, if you cancel your account, Hibe will permanently anonymize the contributed content.
Further information on deletion including delays and policy infringement will be found in our terms of use and privacy policy at launch time.
“Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format.”
We are currently working on a technology that will enable our users to maintain their information even when offline. This inherently means that you can keep your content even after you deactivate or cancel your Hibe account.
All in all
We started Hibe because we respect our social lives and want to improve it online. When we see initiatives promoting awareness on privacy issues and how to make better use of our social tools, it keeps us moving.
Hibe is for you.
original image by futureofprivacy.org
Being Social
Welcome to our first blog post. We intend to use the blog to:
- Give an insight of our researches;
- Provide hints and tips to be more productive on Hibe;
- Share newsworthy headlines in the industry.
As it is Hibe’s mission to provide users with life-like interactions, we start the blog by exploring the differences between our online and offline social environments.
In real life, we manage our professional and private lives with relative ease. Families, friends, co-workers, and lovers exist in separate worlds, at separate times. They only come together when we choose. Online, things are way more complicated.
Chris Peterson’s excellent article “Losing Face”, help us understand why.
A – Social Contexts
Following the work of privacy theorist Helen Nissenbaum, Peterson argues that, in life, we are different persons depending on the context of our interactions. To illustrate his point, he uses Rachel, a college student who just received a friend request from her grandmother.
Nice context mashup
Rachel is normally a completely different person when hanging out with her grandma than with her college friends with whom she shares an extensive party life. She spent years to construct a “perfect angelic self” image for her grandmother, which would be instantly shattered if her relative learns about her college activities. Should Rachel accept her grandmother’s friend request?
Truth is, we all developed social contexts in life. Online, however, we can hardly use them.
Today’s privacy issues often derive from this lack of context support. Social media researcher danah boyd advances the notion of privacy that goes beyond a simple “public” / “private” binary. She argues that privacy is “having control over how information flows”.
Privacy -> Who can see What, When & Where
Think about it. Would you have a conversation with your doctor or your lawyer in a today’s social networks? No. Would you benefit from sharing info with him? Most likely.
B – Norms
Our daily interactions often depend on norms defined by society in general as well as our social contexts. We accept them because they create expectations and enable us to manage our behavior more efficiently. It is the reason we behave differently and expect others to behave differently in a church than in a nightclub.
In the digital realms, these expectations disappear. Rules on social networks are drastically different.
- Information in the real world is often verbal and ephemeral. It now becomes permanent and searchable.
- Typically, social norms relate to corporal situations such as weddings and funerals. Social networks confined them to a single space or “wall”.
- Our parents raised us to behave differently in various situations. Social networks, however, are designed to remove the frontier between each situation, to capture everything you say, and to achieve their financial objectives by monetizing your data. They definitely do not replicate our life.
If we all suddenly become masters in social networks, knowing exactly what information is shared, how, with who, and for how much, would we share our life the same way or would we naturally be more careful about what we say and in which context we say it?
C – Identity, Relationships
In life, we nuance our identity and relationships through time and social contexts. One week of generic posts and a standard profile is hardly a representation of who we are.
We define our identity with the relations we have with our surrounding over a span of time. Here are few examples from my life:
- My relation through the years with my son tells a lot more about me as a dad than just a few pictures of us.
- My log of mountain climbing, which includes dates, locations, photos and comments is infinitely more representative than a simple “I like climbing”.
- My dedication and stubbornness in researching and collecting Gustave Doré’s illustrations shows my attitude in life, not the collection itself.
- I am fortunate enough to have visited many countries and I can guarantee you that the stories behind each visit will tell you a lot more about me than a basic enumeration of the countries visited.
Note that in life, we control:
- What we show and tell in each relationship
- What we want to see and hear from our relationships. People must have the choice of not getting my mountain climbing stories.
Current social networks defaults our identity and our relationships to “profiles”, “status updates”, and “friends”. To present ourselves in a rich manner, we need to either open accounts on a multitude of niche sites or learn how to cheat default settings and try to customize our relationships, none of which is natural, or easy.
D - Audience
Do you know who is watching you?
Peterson quotes lawyer and technologist James Grimmelmann to illustrate this point. “[We] don’t say private things when the wrong people are listening in.”
In life, we have an innate ability to be constantly aware of our surrounding. We adapt our behavior based who we think can see or hear us. To help us, we have a judiciary system that protects our privacy against technological intrusion and limits its use to security-related situations.
Online, however, laws cannot govern who looks at us. In general, social networks state that their “Terms and Agreements” give them the right to nearly anything with our data. The fact is, everything is stored, analyzed and often redistributed to several parties for commercial reasons.
Social networks make sure that it becomes nearly impossible to define who listens to us.
Overall, the discrepancy between our real and online lives is the fundamental drive behind Hibe. We aim to give users the same freedom of choice they have in reality. We believe in our right to privacy.
Images by lamebook.com and Lorri37 (Wikimedia Commons)
