Digital Eviction?
Phil Wolff has a great post about on his DataPortability Blog about The Power to Fight Eviction. He’s talking about what happens when a service that you’ve been using–and have data stored on–shuts down. Phil points out the tension between the business needs of a service provider and the intellectual property rights of the users.
The question is broader than the one product.
It goes to the tension between consumer rights, enterprise service rights, and the health of our society. For example, if a province decides to demolish your building, you have many rights under law to contest that decision. In the US, many cities have laws about protecting historic landmark buildings.
Phil’s post offers six actions that might be appropriate to redress the imbalance of power between a user and the service provider. Briefly, those include:
- Intervention with a back-up service
- Prevent and educate on graceful exit strategy
- Commit to adding appropriate language to contracts (EULAs and TOSs)
- Insure your digital assets
- Advocate for the little guy
- Enforce with real laws and penalties
Coaching Moment: Why is this matter important to digital identity? If it’s an email service, you may have been using that address for a while. The service provider has your address book. They have all of your email. That’s a part of you, right? Or how about a service that you use to create stuff or do paying work? Do you have a back-up? Could you make a back-up? If the provider offers a unique service, is there any way to keep doing this work? What about getting access to your past files? You might imagine, as I do, that there’s a strong need to start talking about creating protection mechanisms for our online work. Like Phil pointed out, everything dies. Let’s work to make that a graceful passing.
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Possibly related posts:
What timing! Ars Technica is running an article, What fair use? Three strikes and you’re out… of YouTube, in which they point out Google’s practice of pulling videos and shutting down accounts of “third strike” offenders.
The article states: