A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

Preempting the Data Sharing Summit (kicking off tomorrow) which aims to address the issue of interoperability between social networks, Marc Canter and co. have published the first draft of a proposed Bill of Rights for participants on the social Web. The idea of the "bill" is to push forward an agenda which gives users of social networking sites and other social web services, a core set of rights in terms of who owns their data, and what can be done with it.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;

• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Of the three main rights, ownership and control are hard to argue against, but the third "freedom" throws up a whole heap of commercial implications relating to data portability. In other words, making it easier for users to migrate or co-exist on other services in a way which lowers the barriers to joining those services by removing the grudge work of re-entering one's own profile data or re-connecting with friends, for example. This broader issue of social networking fatigue, and specifically, data portability is something I've written about here on The Social Web many times before.

The Bill continues:

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Greater interoperability between social networks would of course help to eliminate customer lock-in, so it will be very interesting to see which companies -- especially the big guns such as MySpace and Facebook -- actually sign up to this. It also stands to reason that, in the short term at least, it's in those smaller companies' interests to push this agenda, as much as it is for ordinary users.

Related post: 'Do ordinary users care about data portability? And if not, should they? Four social networks respond'.