Conference takes up social-networks 'bill of rights'

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Two decades after the first Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, a group of privacy advocates, computer scientists and others hopes to wrap up a four-day conference here with what organizers hope will be a milestone for the social Web — a "bill of rights" for social-network users.

Amid a string of privacy snarls this spring by Facebook, Google, AT&T and others, and the phenomenal adoption of online social networks not just by the most computer-savvy but by the rest of society, privacy advocates say it is time to set out a basic set of common principles that consumers could expect social websites to honor.

"Everybody agrees the value of a social network is its users," said Jon Pincus, chief technology officer of Qworky, a Seattle company that makes meeting software for small businesses, and co-chairman of the 20th CFP conference, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. "How do we declare our rights, the minimum that we expect, in a way that sets expectations with site operators and provides a context for discussions about legislation?"

One possible answer to that rhetorical question, said Pincus, is the proposed social-network bill of rights, which Pincus said grew out of the furor involving Facebook privacy-policy changes in April, and efforts by a number of tech journalists and pundits in recent months and years to delineate a set of rules to govern online social networks.

Unfortunately, "none of these have really gone anywhere, so it's a great chance to build on that and also bring in an international focus," Pincus said.

The conference at San Jose State University was attended by representatives from more than a dozen countries.

With political dissidents and citizen journalists in other countries using social services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as avenues to claim free speech under sometimes repressive regimes, Pincus said the bill of rights needed to include dissidents' concerns, such as the ability to have multiple identities on a site.

While Google and Microsoft are supporters of the conference, and Facebook has also participated, the companies have not been part of the actual deliberations on the bill of rights, Pincus said.