Privacy and Plagiarism In The Digital Age
Two articles, one from the WSJ about Microsoft's alleged efforts to have technological end-runs around user privacy interests and another from the NY Times about tracking plagiarism in a digital environment, point to ongoing challenges to traditional legal and social conventions.
The pressures on digital media companies to offer increasingly targeted and data rich consumer/user information to advertisers and marketers is increasingly coming up against public policy concerns over presumed consumer privacy interests.
Sometimes it appears that there is a mixed message from the digital user community where time online increases and social communities multiply like the first life forms on a young Earth. The currently accepted notices and opt-out statements in website privacy statements no longer meet demands for greater user controls over what personal information (even as the definition of "personally identifiable information" evolves) a consumer wants to share. Evidence that major players like Facebook and Microsoft may be willfully ignoring such user interests only increases the tensions and pressure on lawmakers to enact new laws.
As for the almost cosmically infinite range and availability of online information and ideas, in addition to the challenge of sifting the factual from the fanciful and just plain wrong, we now add the question of who originally sourced or even owns the information.
Most of us engage in some copying and pasting and hopefully we remember to cite sources and links, as well as make an editorial judgment as to the information's validity. But the online history and culture of searching, finding and sharing leads not only to issues of early Napster copyright infringement and student plagiarism, but to a deeper question of how to maintain the integrity of original and independent thought and expression in a digital age. More than rights to control and exploit such original expression, there is a question how we maintain boundaries of self amidst a sea of readily intermingles links, pastes and fevered sharing.
Privacy and pride of authorship are words that express ideas and desires that are central to a society that values--or claims to value--individual rights. At the same time, as social and creative beings the digital environment offer exciting ways to express those fundamental parts of our nature as well.
The challenges of law, commerce and individual choice is to try and find a sometimes uneasy harmony among all these competing interests.
The pressures on digital media companies to offer increasingly targeted and data rich consumer/user information to advertisers and marketers is increasingly coming up against public policy concerns over presumed consumer privacy interests.
Sometimes it appears that there is a mixed message from the digital user community where time online increases and social communities multiply like the first life forms on a young Earth. The currently accepted notices and opt-out statements in website privacy statements no longer meet demands for greater user controls over what personal information (even as the definition of "personally identifiable information" evolves) a consumer wants to share. Evidence that major players like Facebook and Microsoft may be willfully ignoring such user interests only increases the tensions and pressure on lawmakers to enact new laws.
As for the almost cosmically infinite range and availability of online information and ideas, in addition to the challenge of sifting the factual from the fanciful and just plain wrong, we now add the question of who originally sourced or even owns the information.
Most of us engage in some copying and pasting and hopefully we remember to cite sources and links, as well as make an editorial judgment as to the information's validity. But the online history and culture of searching, finding and sharing leads not only to issues of early Napster copyright infringement and student plagiarism, but to a deeper question of how to maintain the integrity of original and independent thought and expression in a digital age. More than rights to control and exploit such original expression, there is a question how we maintain boundaries of self amidst a sea of readily intermingles links, pastes and fevered sharing.
Privacy and pride of authorship are words that express ideas and desires that are central to a society that values--or claims to value--individual rights. At the same time, as social and creative beings the digital environment offer exciting ways to express those fundamental parts of our nature as well.
The challenges of law, commerce and individual choice is to try and find a sometimes uneasy harmony among all these competing interests.
posted by Glenn Moss at 8:25 AM
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