The World Economic Forum is asking for big ideas for the future and a few of us have got together to press the case for new digital rights for consumers. They include Brian Behlendorf, the key person behind the Apache open source web server, Katherine Garrett-Cox, finance leader, Josef Penninger, the Austrian genetics pioneer, design winner Hilary Cottam and Catalina Cock, who has led the development in Latin America of what I hope will be fair trade gold coming to shops near you soon.
Key rights are things like inclusive access, software interoperability and a more balanced approach to intellectual property. You can read the call for digital rights here – digital_rights_for_consumers_241108.
But I guess we could cast the net more widely too – with all that personal data up on social networks, should everyone have the right to have at least one digital suicide and wipe it clean? Shouldn’t we own data and innovation that we and other users put up in user generated content? Can we take our avatars with us when leaving a virtual world?
Ha! Like the idea of ‘digital suicide’! With the app I’m working with (http://odadeo.com) if you delete your account, everything is destroyed – I think that should be established as a principle. Facebook merely ‘deactivates’ your account – I think that’s unacceptable. It’s also worth thinking about the way Google indexes things – it would be much harder to delete your digital footprint on google, even if you did delete all your accounts.
Comment by Tom — 6 January, 2009 @ 11:45 pm |