Digital Rights
Digital rights problems
According to a BBC News, in the mid 1990s, children in the UK between the ages of five and 16 had an average of three hours of screen time each day. In 2015, kids consumed six and a half hours of screen time per day. on average.
Back in 2000 we had a shared PC with a single screen and a television in our household. This has changed a lot since then.
If i look around my room now i see 2 laptops, 2 monitors a smart TV, 2 phones and a kindle. Most of us living our lives trough these devices. The companies that make them have a bigger impact on the well being of us than ever before.
Companies like Facebook and Google has neither business incentive nor regulational obligation for your digital well beeing. Their business interest lies in making you spend more time in their application. This creates a conflict of interest between these large companies and their users.
Some of these companies spent millions of dollars on “human” interface guidelines for optimal human - machine interaction. So the interfaces are shiny and feels good to use them. But i know about no major company that has spent any effort on the digital well being of its users.
What i mean by digital well beeing?
- In the age of endless information why can’t you receive notifications from your phone once a day?
- Why can’t you decide what default options are enabled for example with Google Maps and how long?
- Do you know how many applications are currently tracking your location right now?
- Do you know how Youtube categorized your interests?
- When installing an application do you know what features are enabled by default? And how many of these hurt you privacy and well being?
- Did you agree to something when you first started your laptop? What did you agree to?
- While using the app what responsibilities does the app have for you well being?
- Can an application exploit human psychology?
The reason that you don’t have digital well being is that you don’t have proper digital rights.
Regulation to the rescue
To see how far regulations are from actually solving these problems lets look at how GDPR was actually handled.
Due to increased concerns about privacy the EU started to work out a legal framework that would bind tech companies to increase the transparency of how EU citizens data is handled and give them options to handle their own data.
The legislation was not clear on the size of the companies that this targets. All over small company websites started to spam cookie notices and the phrase “Make it GDPR compliant” was thrown left and right.
The bigger companies had some popups where we all clicked on accept without reading and some fees were paid.
We still don’t have any transparency, know nothing about how our data is handled.
Still to this day Instapaper is the only application that was unavailable from europe for a short period of time due to GDPR compliance issues.
On the other hand if you are developing enterprise applications you soon meet the requirement that the data handling should be compliant which basically means that the hardware / software should have lots of legal stamps (This was an actual answer.).
This failure makes it pretty clear that traditional regulation won’t solve these problems.
What can be done?
Digital rights problems are not like any other humanity has faced before.
The way to solve these is to make use of the technological principles we have learned about testing software systems.
We have to first find the problems, name them, design systems that behave the way we want and make sure the testing of these systems is distributed for everyone.
Once we are done with that we can define regulation around it.
Eradicate the wall of text
Since the 90ies the “clicking accept to legal terms without reading to continue install” paved the way for the future we are living in.
Unless well defined painpoints ( privacy, location, responsibilities of the app over the well being of the user ) are not presented in a meaningfull, understandable way it should not be legally binding.
Let the small fish live
Companies that have billions of users should have different rules over them than a ma and pa webshop.
These regulatory distinctions should be tied to the number of users and made clear. If smaller companies have a well defined responsibility i’m certain they would prefer it over the copy pasted terms of use.
Code it
Digital regulation is pointless without showing the way.
For example when GDPR became active there were no official example implementation.
Any digital legislation should come with a Github repository full of example projects for all major frameworks and languages.
Test it
How can we know that a legislation is actually upheld by a major tech company?
Define public facing API-s in the legislation that developers and users all around the world can use to actually run tests over their own data. Sort of like unit tests.
This way regulatory agencies just have to make sure the API responses are valid during audits.
Name it
Most of the problems don’t even have a name yet.
How do you call that for example Youtube recommendation system is promoting extremist views by accident of the algorithm that aims to increase watch time?
If something has no name people cannot talk or reason about it most of the time.
These problems should be identified, described. This is the first step in which anyone can take part.
Talk about it
The Center for humane technology is making a great effor of educating and organizing communities around the various problems we face in Digital Rights.