Legal protections for users of online sites are
often weak. To access online software and
services, a user is often required to read and
approve a long legal consent form that is
presented on the screen. Because of the
ubiquity of these forms, their length, and their
obscure legal terminology, most Internet users
have formed the habit of immediately
scrolling to the bottom of these forms and
clicking the “I accept these conditions”
button, without reading or understanding the
text. When the software is updated, the user
is often required to indicate their agreement
to a new consent form. It becomes
impractical for the average user carefully to
review everything they agree to in this
manner.
Rather than relying on these online consent
forms, most users probably rely on the
reputation of the service provider as the main
guarantor of honesty and service reliability.
Major software and Internet firms can be
expected to be protective of their reputational
capital, and may therefore choose to refrain
from openly deceiving or exploiting their user
base. However, firms that face decline will
sometimes choose to “harvest” their
reputational capital by reneging on their
implicit contract with their users in order to
eke out as much profit as possible before their
time is up. Again, the ‘shadow of the future’
is a relevant problem: while current values and
practices are acceptable, they might not
remain so.
It is interesting to consider whether the same
need for maintaining openness, accountability
and user rights as holds for governments
applies to social space providers. While it can
be argued they are merely providing a
commercial service controlled by contract
law, the importance of online identities and
social spaces might be growing to such an
extent that they are equivalent to social goods
that must be protected by law. If, for
example, one’s Facebook or Google identity is
necessary for living a normal life in society,
then being deprived of it might be equivalent
to depriving somebody of a driver’s licence or
Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights
“We the users expect social network sites to provide us the following rights in their
Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system:
1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service
2. Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find
and understand
3. Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and
justification
4. Empowerment: Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
5. Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies
6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and
share with others
7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree
first
8. Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see
my data.
9. Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data
10. Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I
choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised
11. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who
and what has access to it.
12. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms.
Do not link them without my permission.
17
bank accounts – acts that properly are surrounded by legal rules and methods of appeal.
Another situation in which users are vulnerable is when the use of a service creates a strong “lock-in”. Identity
providers are often in a situation to create considerable lock-in for their users. Once an individual has invested
years in developing an identity, adding content to their online profile and building a deep network of friends
within the system, it becomes costly for that individual to quit or move to a competitor. Due to natural
monopolies for social spaces there might not even be a competitor16. Governments sometimes seek to protect
their citizens against the dangers of such lock-in and the opportunities for exploitation that it creates. Thus, for
example, there are legal protections for tenants, who could face a degree of lock-in once they have moved their
belongings and settled into a rented property. There is also legislation, aimed at protecting consumers and
stimulating competition, that forces cell phone providers to cooperate with customers who wish to switch
provider, making it possible for the customer to keep their telephone number. With the growing importance of
online identity providers, demands may arise for similar protections for this new sphere of human activity. (An
economic analysis or exploration of possible policy options is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.)
The globalized identity
The potential for alienation from the consequences of our actions is not an issue that pertains specifically to
robotics or mediated interaction, but is rather a ubiquitous feature of modern life. To some extent, it may be
counteracted by the proliferation of reporting and media, including live streaming video from all parts of the
world and social media allowing international social relations. Modern man is tied into a network that spans the
world. Our actions as voters, taxpayers, and consumers have consequences that reverberate across the globe;
and at the same time, we are to an unprecedented degree able to become aware of this fact. The increasingly
common perception of people that they are citizens not just of a city and a nation, but also of an international
community is an important change in the self-perception aspect of identity. It is possible that developments in
media and social networks, as well as ideological movements, will continue to give increasing salience to this
dimension of our existence.
Online identities are often already border-crossing: the identity providers are often foreign companies or
organisations, and the actual data storage and processing increasingly occurs in widely dispersed cloud
computing. This trend will continue and intensify as the world grows more globalized, barriers of language are
weakened by improved automatic translation, and people find new kinds of long-range social relations to fulfil
their needs and desires. However, this poses challenges for the current legal system since it tends to assume that
people have their activities and identities focused in their country of residence. When these become
internationalised many aspects of everyday life fall under foreign or international law, potentially causing hard
problems. Besides having private citizens possibly unknowingly performing legally relevant acts in foreign
jurisdictions (from trade to sedition), a wide variety of identity providers and relying parties will be handling
elements of private identity that in the UK and EU enjoy special legal protections (such as medical information:
both Google and Microsoft are running electronic health record services), quite possibly in jurisdictions where
they lack protection. Recent instances of libel-tourism in the UK where foreign plaintiffs file libel suits in the
UK against people abroad that have only tenuous links to the UK (such as an online publication accessible to the
UK public) illustrate how identities and activities suddenly have become global.
These issues are by no means new, but the rapid increase in globalized identities means they will likely become a
key point in developing future international agreements. It might simply be that a truly transnational internet and
national laws are fundamentally irreconcilable: although some conflicts can be handled (e.g. through country-of-
16 Most social spaces – games, dating sites, networking services - become more appealing the more members can be reached
through them, giving the larger spaces much advantage over smaller ones. The exception is spaces based on exclusivity: here
the appeal lies in being a member of a small club it is hard to get into.
18
destination approaches) the eventual choice will be between globalizing law or breaking up the globalization (and
hence much of the utility) of the Internet17.
Would globalized identities shaped by self-selected peer groups mean weaker loyalties to one’s country? At
present there is no clear evidence for or against this possibility. Modern communications media allow both longdistance
nationalism and transnational lifestyles. Historically nationalism appears to have become a weaker
motivator in Western Europe for most people: while people appear to enjoy identifying with groups more than
ever, this is more about social affiliation and signalling than traditional loyalty to a social group and its
institutions. Everyday life and security is no longer dependent on a strong personal stake in the group, but rather
on impersonal formal rules that rarely impinge on life.
The challenge for the national state might be that it has
to compete with numerous other affiliations on the
emotional and social side, and is reduced to a guarantor
of legal rights and provider of services on the practical
side.
It should be noted that a trend towards weaker
nationalism on average does not mean it declines
evenly. Some groups may become more nationalistic or
loyal to various institutions. The real policy challenge
may be to handle a mixture of nationalisms and
loyalisms rather than a homogeneous population.
The virtual worlds
Virtual worlds have been predicted for a long time, but
unlike the early 90’s visions of full immersion virtual
reality the virtual worlds that are currently expanding in
importance are based on fairly traditional ICT
hardware. Social media, online gaming,
teleconferencing and other software fields are de facto
creating virtual worlds right now, and they are
increasingly playing a key role in peoples’ lives. They
are not so much virtual spaces in the sense of
collections of ‘places’ where one might geometrically
move around, but rather social spaces: shared
environments of interaction. These can be as simple as
the text messages used on online bulletin boards where
people maintain local identities as discussion
participants, over the fanciful characters inhabiting
online games, to business avatars used for
teleconferencing virtual environments (such as Second
Life and Teleplace) or video meetings sustained with teleconferencing (or more cheaply, Skype). In each such
space participants have at least one digital identity, more or less strongly linked to their core identity.
These virtual identities, despite possibly being merely a textual description, can still hold a powerful resonance
with their users. Julian Dibbel’s by now classic essay “A Rape in Cyberspace”18 describes how users of an early
17 Uta Kohl, Jurisdiction and the Internet: , Regulatory Competence over Online Activity, Cambridge University press, 2007
Who sets the Facebook rules?
As a global social space, Facebook is faced with many
conflicting demands. The “Saudis in the US” group, a group
for Saudi Arabian students in the US was split by gender
into a male and a female group after some female members
wanted the extra privacy. However, not all members agreed
on the split and some felt it infringed on their freedom of
expression
http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article256543.ece?com
ments=all.
The Facebook decency code bans exposed breasts, which have
led to removing photos of breastfeeding and cancelling the
accounts of mothers posting pictures. This is somewhat ironic
given the less than zealous removal of a paid advertisement
with a topless model.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-
1102950/Mothers-protest-Facebook-ban-offensivebreastfeeding-photos.html
Overall, one of the great challenges to a service such as
Facebook is that it will serve material to people from cultures
that will have significantly different codes of decency, and is
19
text-based virtual environment (a “MUD”) were emotionally violated when another user forced their virtual
characters into humiliating and explicit situations. “…what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither exactly
real nor exactly make-believe, but nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and emotionally true.” Maltreatment of
virtual characters can matter in the real world, since there is an emotional link to the “real” person.
Virtual worlds have their own rules set by the software and moderators, but also partially emergent from the
social interactions of participants. Rules about identity and presentation are often important: what kind of names
may be used, how easy it is to get the real identity of users, what kind of avatars that can be used and the proper
procedure for dealing with breaches of the rules (Dibbel’s essay also describes the aftermath of the incident,
where the virtual community debates the proper punishment for the perpetrator and the “constitutional”
implications for the virtual environment). Often a good relationship between moderators and users is essential
for a successful system, especially as the users need to view the actions of the moderators and owners as
legitimate. These relationships are local to the particular social space, yet the participants might be widely
dispersed and subjected to numerous conflicting legal, economic and cultural demands.
Online economies are starting to have real-world effects; just as new forms of communication and personal
identity-creation are emerging. Online gaming is becoming a massive industry. People are paying real money for
virtual objects or characters. It has been estimated that virtual goods – useful only within particular digital realms
– were exchanged to the value of over 2 billion dollars in 200919. Due to the demand a secondary market of
“gold farming” has developed: workers in developing countries playing games in order to produce virtual goods
that are then sold for real world money20. People are getting into legal wrangling over the goods – virtual thefts,
property rights, inheritance, currencies and taxation are becoming pertinent issues21. Even outside games we
have a sizeable number of virtual possessions – family photos, emails, texts, blogs, websites, etc.– that have
important emotional value to us and form part of our online and real identities. Many are distributed in social
spaces or the cloud worldwide, vulnerable to what the space providers do to them. Digital property rights will
likely become a matter of popular concern simply because their aggregate value is rapidly increasing.
The augmented world
Current trends in ICT is leading to a world of wireless, global 24/7 broadband connectivity accessible through
portable devices and smart environments where many everyday objects have been supplied with networked
abilities (”the internet of things”).
In the words of author Charles Stross, the generation growing up right now will “never be alone, never lost,
never forget”22--- the connectivity holds together social networks regardless of location, users are always findable
18 Julian Dibbel, A rape in cyberspace, chapter 1., My tiny life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, Henry Holt Inc. 1998
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_print.html
19 Tuukka Lehtiniemi, How Big Is the RMT Market Anyway? Virtual Economy Research Network, http://virtualeconomy.org/blog/how_big_is_the_rmt_market_anyw
20 Richard Heeks, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real- World Production in
Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games, in Development Informatics working paper, no. 32
Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester 2008,
21 See Castronova, Edward (2005). Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, as
well as http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2008/10/protectionist-deities-vs-the-economy-of-fun-ownership-of-virtual-possessions/.
22 Charles Stross, LOGIN: 2009 Seattle keynote speech. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login-2009-keynotegaming-in-t.html
20
and know where they are thanks to location services such as built-in GPS, and the devices are increasingly
logging and documenting everything that happens.
This later property is powered by three strong trends: our devices are increasingly recording our lives without our
deliberate decision, thanks to the ubiquity of cheap digital sensing and recording mechanisms from digital
cameras and email over the accelerometers and other sensors in smartphones to the automatic logging of most
computer systems. Cheap storage makes it easier to record everything that could ever be of interest than to try to
determine what to store. Retrieval is facilitated by improved technologies for search, analysis, presentation, and
sharing of the data23. The resulting extended memory is likely to have profound effects on personal identity:
parts of identity will reside in a persistent “exoself” of information and software.
Some people have taken up lifelogging, the use of wearable computers to capture continuous data from their
lives – video feeds, location, physiological information, etc. Some lifeloggers also store and share their life events
on public forums, “life caching”24, while others are living the “data-driven life”25 where the ability to measure
and monitor performance allows them to become aware of or to change their habits. When the idea originated
in the 1990’s it required cumbersome and expensive special equipment: today many of these functions can be
done by amateurs using slightly modified smartphones; and by 2025, it will likely be an application anybody who
chooses can activate. Lifelogging offers many benefits: continuous time monitoring of health, a digital memory
that complements the natural memory (being photographic, searchable, and shareable), self-monitoring, and
possibly producing a cognitive inheritance.
23 For a popular overview, see Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Total recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything, Dutton, 2009
24 http://trendwatching.com/trends/LIFE_CACHING.htm
25 Gary Wolf, The Data-Driven Life, New York Times, April 28 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02selfmeasurement-t.html?_r=1
Living the logged life
The Microsoft research project MyLifeBits is an experiment
in lifetime storage, where Gordon Bell has scanned the
articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, photos,
presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures and voice
recordings and stored them digitally. His ongoing
information flows (phone calls, instant messaging, television
and radio) are being added to this database. The project
aims at develop software methods of managing this kind of
lifetime data, making it easy to capture, annotate, and
integrate it with other software.
Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell (2009). Total Recall: How the
E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Penguin
21
At present researchers are beginning to study the
“exposome” - the air pollutants, physical activity
and diet of people - using life recording devices26.
Since self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, direct
recording might open new possibilities for
epidemiology and environmental medicine as well
as self-experimentation. A perhaps even more
dramatic example is Professor Deb Roy at the MIT
Media Lab, who used cameras and microphones in
every room in his home to document when and
where every word was said in the vicinity of his
infant son. Using this massive corpus of data he is
able to visualize and annotate the first two years of
the child’s life, demonstrating intriguing aspects of
language development as well as producing a total
home video27.
Life recording will also likely to synergize with
social networking to seamless “life sharing”. The
limits of privacy are likely to be pushed as a
generation grows up with this technology. Even if
the average person in 2025 is not using full
lifelogging many of the functions being explored
today will likely exist in the background of their
technology.
While lifelogging may promise many desirable
forms of personal enhancement and selfknowledge,
it also has serious privacy implications.
It makes personal lives traceable and might
challenge many rules on control over personal and
public information. A lifelogger walking down a
street is making copies of copyrighted information,
silently documenting third parties, and possibly
acting as a sensor in a distributed network of whose existence he might not even be aware. Police and other
authorities might have reason to demand access to part or the whole of life recordings, which might not only
raise privacy concerns but actually correspond in the user’s experience to an invasion of mental privacy.
Employer-mandated (or encouraged) lifelogging during work hours might be required in order to avoid liability.
Issues of ownership, spreading and use of lifelog data will expand from the current problems with public
photography, cellphone tracking, personal data storage and smart meters.
26 Brendan Borrell, Epidemiology: Every bite you take, Nature 470, 320-322 (2011)
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110216/full/470320a.html
27 http://web.media.mit.edu/~dkroy/
Please turn off your exoself during start or
landing
February 18 2002 Professor Steve Mann at University of
Toronto ran afoul of the tightening of airport security in the
wake of 911. Professor Mann is one of the pioneers of
wearable computing and has for more than 20 years lived
with an extensive rig of sensors, computers, displays, and
wiring he uses to document his life. The security guards at St.
John's International Airport in Newfoundland required a
strip-search that led to electrodes being torn from his skin
and the disassembly of many components of his rig, leading to
the disruption of his “exoself”. This in turn led to
psychological problems such as concentration difficulties and
behaviour changes, according to Professor Mann .
While in this case the conflict was triggered by the
unfamiliarity of his equipment (see also (Borrell 2011) for
police concerns over visible devices for measuring air pollution
in subways) the increasing use and reliance on cameras,
smartphones, RFID-, wifi- and Bluetooth-enabled
equipment is creating struggles over who has authority to
determine the standards of what augmenting technologies are
allowed in a space.
Since many of these technologies are going to be increasingly
important for everyday life and personal identity, restrictions
are going to be experienced as more cumbersome and
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https://twitter.com/linannlum/status/943825261463769088 https://www.google.gr/maps/place/Zapheirell%C4%93s/@39.2472925,26.2718334,3a,75y,136.32h,77.8t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1jD9hgrJtde6-WJ98cOEsw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x14ba8e5de3945e17:0x60972a5bc9902686!2sAg.+Paraskevi+811+02!3b1!8m2!3d39.248085!4d26.2713609!3m4!1s0x14ba8e5de2b001d1:0x8b300310c2bf9ffb!8m2!3d39.247215!4d26.2717558 Vuonna 1970 sata vuotta täyttäneitä oli vain parikymmentä. Sen jälkeen määrä on tuplaantunut noin kymmenen vuoden välein.
Tämä vuoden alussa Suomessa oli 870 yli satavuotiasta. Heistä 359 vietti Ellin tavoin yhteisiä satavuotisjuhlia itsenäisen Suomen kanssa.
