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. Phill?!). However, I hope that the students and guests will discuss that these kinds of initiatives are just one brigde too far. Is reputation defender a tool to defend or artifically improve your reputation?

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.