

Ask HN: What should an Internet “Bill of Rights” include? - rblion


======
angersock
More upvotes, for one.

More seriously, I think that a few things are in order for services:

1\. Information collected about a user must _always_ disclosed ahead of time,
and such explanations must be _always_ worded succinctly and clearly.

2\. Information collected about a user is _always_ available to be downloaded
by that user--there should be no cases where a user is not able to replicate
what their service has collected about them. Note that this does not include
secondary, derived information (for example, statistics calculated from the
data collected).

3\. The sharing of a user's information must _always_ be disclosed before it
happens, and the user given a straightforward opportunity to disallow that
sharing (perhaps at the cost of their continued service).

4\. A user must _always_ be able to request _all_ data gathered about them or
derived from data gathered about them be expunged from a service. Population
statistics calculated from this data do not have to be altered.

5\. A user must _always_ be allowed to create new accounts without having to
link them to pre-existing accounts--in effect, anonymous accounts.

