The Contract for the Web is a new thing that wants people to endorse it.
While there is much to like in it, what we see under Principle 5 (of 9) is a deal-breaker:
Respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust.
So people are in control of their lives online, empowered with clear and meaningful choices around their data and privacy:
- By giving people control over their privacy and data rights, with clear and meaningful choices to control processes involving their privacy and data, including:
- Providing clear explanations of processes affecting users’ data and privacy and their purpose.
- Providing control panels where users can manage their data and privacy options in a quick and easily accessible place for each user account.
- Providing personal data portability, through machine-readable and reusable formats, and interoperable standards — affecting personal data provided by the user, either directly or collected through observing the users’ interaction with the service or device.
Note which party is “giving” and “providing” here. It’s not the individual.
By this principle, individuals should have no more control over their lives online than what website operators and governments “give” or “provide” them, with as many “control panels” as there are websites and “user accounts.” This is the hell we are in now, which metaphorically iworks like this:
It also leaves unaddressed two simple needs we have each had since the Web came into our lives late in the last millennium:
- Our own damn controls, that work globally, at scale, across all the websites of the world; and
- Our own damn terms and conditions that websites can agree to.
At Customer Commons we encourage #1 (as has ProjectVRM, since 2006), and are working on #2.
If you want to read the thinking behind this position, a good place to start is the Privacy Manifesto draft at ProjectVRM, which is open to steady improvement. (A slightly older but more readable copy is here at Medium.)
We also recommend Klint Finley‘s What’s a Digital Bill of Rights Without Enforcement? in Wired. He makes the essential point in the title. It’s one I also made in Without Enforcement, GDPR is a Fail, in July 2018.
A key point here is that companies and governments are not the only players. As we say in Customers as a Third Force, each of us—individually and collectively—can and should be players too.
We’ll reach out to Tim Berners-Lee and others involved in drafting this “contract” to encourage full respect for the independent agency of individuals.
