Thursday, March 20, 2008

Panel proposal: Privacy, Reputation, and the Management of Online Communities

The "Frank" who mentioned in the Autoadmit/Juicy Campus thread that he had submitted a panel on related topics turned out to be Frank Pasquale of Seton Hall Law School ... it's an excellent proposal, and so I asked for his permission to post excerpts here to spark discussion.

Here's the summary:
Reputation management online demands a certain measure of control over the revelation of personal information and its distribution across networks. Yet such control conflicts with values of free expression and many business models. How, then, can the individual interest in reputation and control of personal information be balanced against expressive and market values? This panel will address these issues in the context of recent developments in social networking and personalization technologies.
Panelists include Ann Bartow and Danielle Citron, and the detailed description lists some of the controversies (oh yeah!) they'll be discussing, including the AutoAdmit Harassment and Defamation Lawsuit, privacy concerns related to Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick, and Facebook News Feed, Social Ads and Beacon.

Intriguing indeed, as well as relevant and timely. Or so it seems to me. What do others think?

And there are usually ways to improve any proposal, so what suggestions do people have: related topics, more controversies to consider, and so on?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Leading by example, I'll go first with a suggestion:

As well as Google/DoubleClick, I think it would be great to consider Microsoft/Yahoo! -- the privacy implications are even more complex, with Microsoft still bound by the Passport FTC Consent Decree.

And in both of these -- as well as other topics -- I hope panelist will represent the international perspective as well as the US views.