The Googlization of Everything

I put no faith in privacy policies issued by Web service firms. For one thing, they always reserve the right to change them. So only one side of the user-provider relationship can change the terms of the deal without notice or cost. Second, they do not produce a general improvement in the privacy/identity/reputation ecosystem. Third, because they are written in legalese and generally hard to find, most users ignore them anyway. And fourth, most of them explicitly declare they will not respect users' privacy.

But I do wish that more firms adopted clear, declarative, non-jargon-filled, helpful privacy policies like this site:

Privacy & Tracking Policy

Your privacy is important to us. It’s a major part of the value of this site, so we take it very seriously. And that’s why we don’t even make you register.

Here are a few things you should know:

* It is not possible for anyone to use this website to find out who you are or where you are located
* We do not collect any information directly from you. You’ve never given us your name or email address, and we don’t want it.
* We do not track any information that can be used by us to identify you.

Tips for the extra-cautious:

* We do put a cookie on your computer. This cookie holds a unique ID provided by the ****** database and we use it to identify if someone has voted and what their vote is. We also use it tell whether you have already replied to a post and which your reply was.
o You have the option of disabling cookies on your browser, or deleting them after your session if you so choose. The website will still continue to function properly, and we’d have no way of matching your votes or replies to your computer.
* Servers do, as a matter of course, keep logs. This includes geographic information and ip addresses.
o If you are particularly concerned about hiding your ip address, there are several services that offer free ip-cloaking. Just do a quick search on Google and find one you like…
o Note: All that an ip address means is that you (or someone using your connection) were on the site. The logs do not directly associate ip addresses with specific posts.

Wow. Pretty cool, huh?

There is a bigger problem here, though. This policy is from Juicy Campus, perhaps the most irresponsible, exploitative, and potentially harmful non-pornographic Web 2.0 site out there.

The site is filled with the most horrible and hateful rumor-mongering, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, and generally irritating crap around. And that's saying something.

So while Juicy Campus pledges to protect the anonymity and privacy of the racists and homophobes who post on their site (which, in the classic Web 2.0 way is ad-supported and intentionally irresponsible for the content), it offers no recourse to its victims -- those insulted, libeled, harassed or outed by the posts.

This is the perfect example of the problems that Dan Solove described in The Future of Reputation. Here is what Dan wrote on Concurring Opinions about Juicy Campus. And it's solid evidence of the need for comprehensive privacy regulations.

But Juicy Campus teaches us more than that. It shows us once again that "privacy" does not capture all of the values and conflicts orbiting such practices. While anonymous speech is valuable, it is not the only value worth protecting. Yet it is the only value our laws currently protect -- and even then they do so imperfectly. We should be concerned about how individuals are treated by these systems. And we should construct safeguards and mechanisms for people to use to manage their public profiles. Everyone should have some measure of control over what information (true or false) gets circulated about him or her. And Web 2.0 sites should have some measure of responsibility for what they host.