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. 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