GROUP TWO

Reputation Bankruptcy

Scope

• Identity-related content:

- Pictures, Videos

- all pieces of content that would reveal the identity of a person [i.e. we believe a general discussion of Star Wars Kid [1] is not necessarily bad; however pieces of content linking StarWars Kid's real name to the footage are potentially harmful for the person and moreover add very little value]

• Minors:

- Content uploaded by minors about themselves or other minors

- excludes: 25 year-old uploads pictures of when 16 (exception for content of you as a minor poster by another)

- Reference point: provision to wipe juvenile criminal record (e.g. expungement)

Involved Parties

• Individual Identified or Depicted

• Content Creator (Person who creates content i.e. takes a picture)

• Content Sharer (Person who uploads content to Content Storage/Distribution Platform)

• Content Storage/Distribution Platforms (Personal Blog vs Facebook)

• Note: some of these parties could be the same person in certain scenarios

• Search Engines

The Recent Scholarship and Proposed Solutions

• Law-Based:

• Anupam Chander: Strengthened tort for public disclosure of private fact

• Paul Ohm: Law barring employers from firing based on legal off-duty conduct found in social networking profiles

• Dan Solove: Give legal right to sue Facebook friends where confidence has been breached

• Peter Taylor: Constitutional right to privacy/“oblivion” allowing more anonymity online

• Cass Sunstein: DMCA Notice-and-Takedown Model

• Code-Based:

• Jonathan Zittrain: Rating systems that allow you to declare reputation bankruptcy in certain area

• Victor Mayer-Schonberger: Digital Forgetting/Expiration dates (in “Delete”)

• Market- and Norm- Based:

• Private companies to defend reputation, e.g. Reputation Defender

• Educate the public, especially young people

• Tim Berners-Lee: establish market norm of employers barred from accessing Facebook data of prospective employees

Concerns

• Entanglement: who "owns" what information about a person and thus what can be managed / deleted, i.e. reposts of images, comments, wall posts
• How far to go on the identity "continuum“

• Authentication > pseudonymity > anonymity (Ardia)

• Total deletion or selective management?

• Reputations would be meaningless if they could be subject to a legal right to manipulate (Chander)

Sources

• “The End of Forgetting” NY Times 7/25/10, Jeffrey Rosen (law professor at George Washington University) [2]

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• "Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People From Speaking About You", Eugene Volokh [3]

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