Social Networks Need a Universal Bill of Rights

Greg Bernhardt

Privacy policies need more consistency. We have already seen that sites will respond to user demands if they are concentrated and focused, thus it's time for a Social Networks Bill of Rights!

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brainstorm

If someone told you that they had some juicy information about a mutual friend, would you agree to hear it or would you refuse to listen without the friend's permission? What if it was your partner? The point is that the biggest part of the problem of privacy lies in the fact that people are willing to consume information that violates someone else's privacy without considering the ethics of it. Whenever some public scandal emerges of a celebrity, how many people check first to see if the information was obtained ethically before biting in to the juicy details? I'm not saying that such a bill of rights wouldn't be a step in the direction of ethics, but actually establishing an ethics of information that people would agree on and respect voluntarily would be a useful first step - and a lot more difficult I suspect.