Terms of Service Brainstorming

From Dharmishta 04:26, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

This is a the current draft of the Friendly ToS, a collaboration between me Bill Bushey, Parker Phinney, Erhardt Graeff, Frank Tobia, Seth Woodworth and Tim Hwang. We've just been drafting this stuff in our free time, and would love to have anyone from this class (or anyone else who has found themselves to this wiki page) on our mailing list where we discuss this stuff! Feel free to edit it here.

FriendlyToS Version 0.01

Service providers have not lived up to their responsibility to their users. In the current paradigm of ToS and Privacy Policies, the user is disempowered and vulnerable to a loss of privacy. Users should be empowered with the ownership of and knowledge about their own data on these services.

The prevalence of online services makes the Terms of Service an increasingly important force in defining the terms of the web’s cultural and community ecosystem. However, to date, the larger web community concerned about freedom online has not yet coalesced a consensus around how best to structure the Terms of Service in the same way that it has done in the world of copyright or patenting. We the undersigned seek to fill that gap -- proposing an overarching set of standards that will protect liberties and promote the responsible stewardship of online spaces.

In the past, communities have generated solutions for dealing with the legalities of the relationship between a service and an individual. The GNU Public License revolutionized the world of software by providing a unified standard of freedom to access, change, and redistribute code. Similarly, Creative Commons provided creators the freedom to choose how to license their content. We advocate for a similar approach that will remake the expectations and responsibilities surrounding the user-service relationship.

Recognizing the long history of discussion surrounding the concept of “freedom” in the digital space, we adopt the term “friendly” to describe these declarations. This term embraces the desire not only to secure freedom as the physical infrastructure of the internet shifts in the coming decade, but also to enshrine the terms of fair dealing in that space as well.

A Terms of Service, End User License Agreement, Privacy Policy and all documents tied to the user-service relationship are consistent with the values of the FriendlyToS if they comply with the following requirements. We also specify the details of a FreeToS, which leverage the terms of the FriendlyToS to construct an online space that is more affirmatively free in its use of data:

Friendly ToS

  LEGAL As to the legal form of a FriendlyToS, we declare the following:

• Human Readable: FriendlyToS advocates the creation of human-readable licenses, which allow the user to quickly identify the relevant terms of notification, use of data, and data ownership.

• Standardization in Code and Text: In an effort to aid this process, FriendlyToS advocates the creation of a standardized way of representing these legal structures in code and text, which will bolster the development of applications which support users in understanding the terms of their digital environment.

  RIGHTS A FriendlyToS respects the following rights in order to be consistent with the protection of freedom:

• Notification: The ability to change the terms of an agreement without the knowledge of the user is a violation of trust in online spaces. We declare that a FriendlyToS is one in which the service provider give adequate advance notification to users of changes to their legal relationship and provides an archived history of past versions.

• Transparency of Data Distribution and Storage: Service providers must provide clear information about which third-parties receive data, what data is stored, and how long that data is stored for. Any data that enters the hands of third parties should be made clear by the service at the outset and made easily viewable by the users at any time.

• Data Ownership: Similarly, a FriendlyToS views vagueness on the ownership of content produced or uploaded to an online space as an affront to fair dealing. The relationship between provider and user and the ownership of data should be made clear at the outset and made easily viewable by users at any time.

• Neutrality: These requirements are explicitly neutral as to the terms of ownership, the transfer of data to third parties, the types of data being stored, and how long the data is stored, so long as there exists complete transparency about these practices.

• Accessibility: A FriendlyToS provides users with the right to see what personal data is being collected and held by the provider at any time. This information should be clear, concise, and colloquial.

  FreeToS We believe that a FriendlyToS also lays the groundwork for an online space to be fundamentally more free in important ways. The FreeToS is an extension of these beliefs, and functions in addition to the regular FriendlyToS. The terms of this space would include:

• Data Portability: The inability to easily exit a service generates conflict of interest and an inherently flawed power imbalance between user and provider. The FriendlyToS believes that healthy relationships are possible only by ensuring that users are given the right to port a copy of their data locally, at any time.

• Interoperability: The right to portability is useless if the issue of formatting is not addressed. A non-interoperable set of data is no better than a non-portable set of data, and as such a Friendly ToS advocates in favor of ensuring that users can port data in open and interoperable formats.

• Write Access: A FreeToS provides a formal process by which users have the right to request that a service completely delete information that belongs or is associated with them. It also allows a user to modify data about that user held by the service.