Notes from the 5th Internet, Law and Politics Conference: The Pros and Cons of Social Networking Sites, organized by the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 6th and 7th, 2009. More notes on this event: idp2009.
Law Track Gather Up
Daithí Mac Sithigh
Because we are Internet users, or intensive SNS users, we can put interesting and critical questions. Would it make any difference wouldn’t we be such kind of users?
Article 29 Working Party: how to find a data controller, how to define the default settings, what should be the usage of nicknames and pseudonyms, how should we treat peole under 18 (or under 14, as it also is the case of Spain), what happens to non-members of SNS, or what exactly is the domestic exemption?
Users create cognitive shortcuts that create some harms on our society that we do not fully understand. And solutions to these shortcuts are not that simple, because it attempts against the very nature of SNS and what their users are actually looking into them.
Examples:
- Bodil Lindqvist about EU privacy laws
- Lori Drew and Megan Meier’s suicide
- John Sawers or how important personalities of the MI6 find their photos on Facebook
- Phorm being dropped from British Telecom
- Sunday Express publishing “dirty” stories and being violently “punished” by it
We are reaching a breaking point regarding the Terms of Service and conditions of SNS: either we will give up the fight, or we will ignore them or fight them until the end.
More Information
- IDP 2009: Day 1 Report, Daithí Mac Sithigh’s slides of his presentation
- IDP2009: Written Report of Day 1, by Daithí Mac Sithigh
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