GROUP TWO

Reputation Bankruptcy

Motivation To Discuss Reputation Bankruptcy

• "75% of US recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants", recent Microsoft study (via [1])
• With quickly improving facial-recognition technology, there will be a stark challenge to "our expectation of anonymity in public" (via [2])
• Viral dynamics of the internet may amplify reputation damage (e.g. search engine rankings)
• COPPA protection ends at age 13 and has proven ineffective:

• 37% of children aged 10-12 have Facebook accounts and 4.4 million Facebook users under age 13 in the US despite Facebook policy in compliance with COPPA (see video [3]

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 [4] is not necessarily bad; however pieces of content linking Star Wars 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) [5]

• Potential Issue: Minors who are of "legitimate public interest" i.e. celebrities, performers/actors, (what about: children of famous public figures)

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)

• Search Engines

• Note: some of these parties could be the same person in a given scenario

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

• Children's Online Privacy Protection Act COPPA [6]:
  • Scope: "If you operate a commercial Web site or an online service directed to children under 13 that collects personal information from children or if you operate a general audience Web site and have actual knowledge that you are collecting personal information from children, you must comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act." -- too narrow?!

• Germany considers law to ban employers from mining information on job candidates from social networking sites such as Facebook to protect people's privacy. [7]

• 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” [8]); "Vanish" [9] - new technology developed by researchers at University of Washington, for electronic messages to "self-destruct" after certain period

• Market- and Norm- Based:

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

• Educate the public, especially young people

• Society norms to adapt to new media: "Please don't tweet this" (via [10])

• 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) [11]

• Web takes away "second chances": "the worst thing you've done is often the first thing everyone knows about you"
• ReputationDefender a "promising short-term solution", but not enough given fast advances of "facial-recognition technology"

• "Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People From Speaking About You", Eugene Volokh [12]

• Scope: restrictions on communication
• "recognition of one free speech exception certainly does not mean the end of free speech generally"
• "possible unintended consequences of various justifications for information privacy speech restrictions [...] sufficiently troubling"
• "disclosure" tort - bars dissemination of "nonnewsworthy" personal information that most people would find highly private (some state laws more specific, e.g. "criminal laws forbidding the publication of the names of rape victims"
• (II)D. Contracts with Children: the "discussion of contracts presupposes that both parties are legally capable of entering into the contract and of accepting a disclaimer of any implied warranty of confidentiality. If a cyber-consumer is a child, then such an acceptance might not be valid" (Source: Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 [13], 15 U.S.C. §§ 6501 et seq.; Matlick, note 245 infra; Singleton, infra note 251, text accompanying nn.76-79.)