Day 7 Predictions

In the spirit of today's issues, our collective anonymous predictions are set out below:

On the issue of online defamation, I hope our guests will not be too narrowly focused on the need to ensure accountability through identification and attribution. The democratic benefits of leaving an option open for anonymous contribution is important also, to help encourage frank speech and content. It seems to me that this would be particularly relevant in the US jurisdiction, where strong First Amendment principles are unlike what we see pretty much anywhere else in the world (which also raises the discrete sub-issue of how we can reconcile different international views of what an appropriate level of privacy protection might be). Like Dispute Finder discussed yesterday - their emphasis is not to resolve an issue in dispute, but to highlight for the public that there is a conflict, which cannot exist without vocalization of many different points of view, no matter how unpopular.

Probably, Mr. Fertik will try to persuade us that Reputation Defender offers great advantages to improve our reputation (even promoted by Dr. Phil?!). However, I hope that the students and guests will discuss that these kinds of initiatives are just one bridge too far. Is reputation defender a tool to defend or artificially improve your reputation?

There are, however, a lot of merits behind services like Reputation Defender. Many people believe that Reputation Defender is one of the best things that has happened to the Internet (assuming, of course, you have the ability to pay for it). It gives people a great way to remove defamatory, or potentially defamatory, content in a way where it harms nobody and helps those who it should. I'm really interested in the tactics Reputation Defender uses to increase Google page ranks (MyEdge) in a way that makes sure it doesn't get the Google Death Penalty.

In terms of anonymity on the Internet in the user's control, I think services such as Tor do quite a good job. There still are weaknesses associated with the exit nodes of Tor allowing hackers to access user names and passwords due to the lack of encryption technologies available.

Besides this, Ryan and the people of Mozilla will show the great advantages of understandable privacy policies in the form of icons. This might encourage people to actually check whether the website uphold certain privacy standards. Even more importantly, it would allow users, in an easy way, to realize the diverse range of privacy policies (and amount of information released to third parties) that various add-ons have (the Location Aware feature of Firefox version 3.5, for example, can tap into a wide range of information). While the advantages of easy-to-understand privacy icons are straightforward, the guests likely to justify why modifications to the browsers that we use are a necessary or desired way to implement them.

As we discussed yesterday, the people at the Mozilla foundation can take any idea to improve the internet from a fanciful theory to a concrete reality very quickly. It seems likely, then, that they are deluged with causes to adopt and browser functionality to build in. It would be interesting to hear how they decided what to focus on, and why privacy rose to the top of the list.