... Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal for what we know as the Internet. Now he is calling for a 'bill of rights' to protect its independence[i].
The web is changing. Once it was a non-corporate,
non-mainstream space, undefined and open to innovation. Two things happened:
the computing/dotcom boom, and Web 2.0, making computing and web based
companies some of the world’s biggest. Their market? Web 2.0 made the web sociable
and interactive, bringing us Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and in the process
opened up the web to the ‘prosumer’, producer and consumer of online content –
in other words, you and me.
What the big tech companies like Microsoft and Apple have in
common with social networking sites is that they try to build up a monopoly by
creating “walled gardens” of hardware or websites that discourage travel
outside their domains. At the moment for
example you access your gmail account and Google+ and YouTube using a single
password. Depending on whether you buy an iPad or iPhone or PC you are
restricted as to what programs or software you can use.[ii]This inhibits freedom and discourages innovation[iii]
– why innovate for a device that’s ‘locked down’? – so why have we so readily
bought into the walled garden scenario of the web?
A closed system reduces the risk of crashes, glitches and theft[iv].
Cookies installed by websites on your computer speed up connections. And then
there’s the attractiveness factor: the “undeniably attractive aesthetic” of the
iPhone for example[v]. As we are increasingly living our lives online (making friends,
shopping, checking bank accounts), this is important stuff.
The problem is that what with all the vocabulary about
‘friends’ and ‘sharing’, we tend to forget that our online lives are lived in a
corporate environment[vi].
We’re aware of privacy issues, of course, when it comes to things like allowing
strangers access to our holiday photos. Yet we continue to upload a huge amount
of data about ourselves when it’s often not clear who owns the data. Austrian
student Max Schrems created an activist group Europe versus Facebook in order
to highlight privacy concerns:
Schrems filed a series of complaints with the Irish Data
Protection Agency,
accusing Facebook of retaining data users had tried to delete and also saying that his file wasn’t long enough. Facebook refused to turn over some
information — such as Schrem’s biometic faceprint — saying it was a trade
secret. Even though the claim that the technology the company’s applied
to personal information is proprietary seems reasonable, many lambasted
Facebook for suggesting that users’ data was Facebook’s intellectual property.[vii]
accusing Facebook of retaining data users had tried to delete and also saying that his file wasn’t long enough. Facebook refused to turn over some
information — such as Schrem’s biometic faceprint — saying it was a trade
secret. Even though the claim that the technology the company’s applied
to personal information is proprietary seems reasonable, many lambasted
Facebook for suggesting that users’ data was Facebook’s intellectual property.[vii]
Even when you’re not signed in, social networking sites and
others can track your movements and collect data that you’re not aware of
having shared, such as browsing habits, and pass this data on to third party
sites including advertisers[viii].
And they’re not the only ones interested. Last year the Prism
scandal erupted when it was made public that the National Security Agency in
the US was using tech companies’ data to monitor non-US citizens’ online
activities[ix].
In 2011 US lawyers unsuccessfully tried to have a UK student extradited to face
charges of providing links to pirated material on his site. When Arab Spring
protestors in Egypt used social networking sites to arrange meetings and
demonstrations, the Egyptian government responded by closing down the Internet[x].
Robert W McChesney, a US author and academic, sees the gathering of online
information by the big tech companies, with the assent and collusion of
government, as evidence that the current development of the Internet is working
against the interests of an open and democratic society[xi].
The Web allows access to worlds of information almost unimaginable twenty years ago – most of the information used in this post was freely available on the Web. Unavoidably legislation is struggling to keep up. But at some point we, the community of surfers and Facebookers and bloggers and everyone else on the Web, have to ask: what sort of online space do we want to inhabit? And what are we prepared to give in exchange?
The Web allows access to worlds of information almost unimaginable twenty years ago – most of the information used in this post was freely available on the Web. Unavoidably legislation is struggling to keep up. But at some point we, the community of surfers and Facebookers and bloggers and everyone else on the Web, have to ask: what sort of online space do we want to inhabit? And what are we prepared to give in exchange?
[i] Kiss, J (2014). An Online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee
calls for bill of rights for web. Guardian, [online], available: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/12/online-magna-carta-berners-lee-web
[accessed 12 March 2014].
[ii] Anderson, J, and
Rainie, L. (March 23, 2012). The Future
of Apps and Web. Pew Internet & American Life Project, [online]
available: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Apps-and-Web/Overview.aspx, [accessed December 7,2013].
[iii] Herther, NK (2012). The Future of Mobile. Searcher,
[online], 20, (10), pp. 18-25, available: CINAHL Plus with Full Text, EBSCOhost,
[viewed 21 May 2013].
[iv] Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). Future of the Internet : And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT, USA:
Yale University Press, p 3. [online] available:
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/dkitlib/Doc?id=10315687&ppg=12
[vi] Sar, RK, and Al-Saggaf, Y. (2013). Propagation of
Unintentionally Shared Information and Online Tracking. First Monday, [online], 18 (6), available:http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4349/3681 [accessed 9 December 2013].
[vii] Hill, K. (2012). The Austrian Thorn in Facebook’s
Side. Forbes [online], 2 February,
available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/ [accessed 7 December 2013].
[ix] Weber, H. (2013). President Obama says PRISM “does not
apply to U.S. citizens” or people living the U.S., The Next Web [online], available: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/07/president-obama-says-prism-does-not-apply-to-u-s-citizens-or-people-living-the-us/#!pjviC [accessed 9 December 2013]; The Guardian [online], available: http://www.theguardian.com/world/prism [accessed 9 December 2013].
[x] Hillesley R (2012). Internet censorship: let it rot in
walled gardens, Tech Republic, [online], available: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/internet-censorship-let-it-rot-in-walled-gardens/1333 [accessed 2/5/2013]
[xi]Orbesen,
J. (2013). When Capitalism Consumed the Internet. Salon [online], April 14, 2013,
available: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/when_did_the_internet_become_a_for_profit_venture_partner/
[accessed 9 December 2013].
