Proposed Law Would Require Social Networks to be Private by Default

May 16, 2011 at 12:08 am PT

A proposed California law could significantly change the way social networks operate by forcing them to step up their privacy settings.

Facebook and other Internet companies oppose the proposal, which was put forward by California Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro) and last week made it out of committee.

The proposed law, SB 242 (full text here), would require social networks to do the following for California users:

Establish default settings that prohibit the public or private display of anything other than a user’s name and city without their consent.
Require new users to pick privacy settings during the registration process.
Write their privacy options “in plain language” and display them in an “easy-to-use format.”
Remove personally identifying information, including photos, within 48 hours of a user’s request.
Pay up to $10,000 each time they fail to do any of this.

A previous version of the bill applied to children under 18, but a revision earlier this month made it much broader. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

Corbett’s pitch is this: “You shouldn’t have to sign in and give up your personal information before you get to the part where you say, ‘Please don’t share my personal information.’”

Facebook and other Internet companies don’t like the bill, and industry groups such as the Internet Alliance and NetChoice have spoken out against it. They argue that such tightened privacy restrictions and regulatory oversight could hamstring social networks’ ability to provide valuable and safe experiences to users.

For instance, if the default settings are all private, it could be hard for new members to get value out of the sites because they won’t be found by other users.

Other opponents argue that this should be a national issue, not a state one.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes gave this statement to the San Francisco Chronicle:

Any legislative or regulatory proposal must honor users’ expectations in the contexts in which they use online services and promote the innovation that fuels the growth of the Internet economy. This legislation is a serious threat both to Facebook’s business in California and to meaningful California consumers’ choices about use of personal data.

Majority Leader Corbett is further accusing Facebook of secretly lobbying against the bill without disclosing its identity. (Sound familiar?) We’ve asked Noyes for clarification on this issue.

Update: Noyes replied: “We’re confused by the claim raised in the SF Chron story that Facebook is involved in some kind of “stealth” campaign to kill SB 242 when, as the article acknowledges, we met face-to-face with the bill’s author and every other member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to express our concerns.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Tagged with: California, Ellen Corbett, Facebook, privacy, SB 242

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A Noyes

We’re confused by the claim raised in the story that Facebook is involved in some kind of “stealth” campaign to kill SB 242 when, as the article acknowledges, we met face-to-face with the bill’s author and every other member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to express our concerns.

In addition, we’ve had half a dozen other meetings with Sen. Corbett, starting in January, including her visit to our Palo Alto headquarters in February to talk with our COO and a call as
recently as the day before the Senate Judiciary hearing with our VP of public policy. In each of these interactions, we have raised serious
concerns about SB 242 directly to Sen. Corbett.

We will continue to make the case on our own–and with groups like Klaas Kids, the California Chamber of Commerce, TechNet and others–because we and many other online safety experts and industry groups believe SB 242 in its current form is bad for Californians and bad for growing technology companies like Facebook who call California home.

- Andrew Noyes, Facebook, Manager, Public Policy Communications
http://www.famebook.com famebook

It does seem to me that if history has taught us anything, it is that continually poking a stick at a sleeping bear will probably end in misery. The bear being a metaphor for Facebook’s users and their respective elected leaders and the stick being a seemingly overwhelming arrogance towards both. As the above veiled threat demonstrates.

700m people have confirmed they like being connected but that doesn’t mean they’ve either endorsed the business model or indeed that it is necessarily the right one. I’m just 1/700m worth of opinion, but firmly believe I am within the majority and think it’s time Facebook puts down its stick and has a rethink on how to win the bear’s universal affection. (Maybe it’s time to IPO, shuffle the leadership and focus on how it can carry the wave of public opinion with it, instead of constantly fighting against it?)I know I can go into any bar or shop in the world and buy a Coca Cola. I TRUST that it will taste right, be safe and I tip my hat to one of the great US brands. Facebook can’t bully its way to that position. Ever. Opt In as a default should be law and if that means they have to take a step back to take a leap forwards then so be it. As Facebook states that it is designed for connecting with your friends, then it’s quite patronising to suggest we can’t all find each other and a pretty weak defence.

Or in the words of Baloo:

“And don’t spend your time lookin’ around
For something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin’ about it
I’ll tell you something true

The bare necessities of life will come to you”
http://www.afmarcom.com/ Angelique

Ellen Corbett’s ideas would be more convincing if she knew what she was talking about. A check of her website shows that neither she nor her staff use Twitter or Facebook to communicate with her constituents. That’s very surprising in this day and age. Suggestions by a luddite to restrict the choices made by social networks don’t carry a lot of weight.
http://www.facebook.com/californiadreamin Josh LeClair

The bill wouldn’t be so horrifying (still a bit much) if it didn’t also force facebook to delete basically any information a parent requests for their minor children. How does the state of California think facebook is going to verify that someone is actually the parent of the child? Not only will this place a huge burden on Facebook in terms of man hours needed but also financially.

It’s ripe for abuse, either from strangers, other kids that may not like a particular kid, parents that are divorced or from parents that have lost all custody of their kid. How in the heck is Facebook supposed to take all of that into account when they get a request from a parent to remove information/pictures?
http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com Liz Gannes

That’s a good point to raise.
http://www.famebook.com famebook

That is a good point. It would be far easier then if the age limit were raised in line with movie and game certification then Facebook need take no responsibility whatsoever. Given that Facebook themselves have a proven capacity for errors of judgement, I’m not sure how one establishes at what age you should be protected from making them. Let’s be honest, if Opt In was a default, then the bulk of children or young adults wouldn’t be inadvertently exposing themselves to risk beyond their own networks in the graph. As to Facebook’s financial burden; all these issues are present because they are following a business model which can only survive by eroding an individual’s privacy or perception of what privacy is, so it can target advertising. They have an assumption of ownership of the user’s content and some blind belief that because they’ve forced themselves into ubiquity, that signifies a tacit approval of that process by the users. Neither are a reality.

If a person’s digital home was treated with the same rights as their physical one, then the whole game is changed for the better in my opinion and actually people would volunteer their likes and dislikes abundantly, especially if they would benefit directly from leasing the ad space on their pages. The money should be in the commerce layer not the ad layer. The latter should feed value to the media head of the tech long tail which in turn also saves aspiration. As I said below, scale proves we like to be connected, it doesn’t prove the model isn’t flawed.

I think we have been missing ist and ism off the current path of social.