Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

ISSN

0048-1572

Publisher

College of Law, Ohio State University

Language

en-US

Abstract

As online social media grow, it is increasingly important to distinguish between the different threats to privacy that arise from the conversion of our social interactions into data. One well-recognized threat is from the robust concentrations of electronic information aggregated into colossal databases. Yet much of this same information is also consumed socially and dispersed through a user interface to hundreds, if not thousands, of peer users.

In order to distinguish relationally shared information from the threat of the electronic database, this essay identifies the massive amounts of personal information shared via the user interface of social technologies as “social data.” The main thesis of this essay is that, unlike electronic databases, which are the focus of the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs), there are no commonly accepted principles to guide the recent explosion of voluntarily adopted practices, industry codes, and laws that address social data.

This essay aims to remedy that by proposing three social data principles — a sort of FIPPs for the front-end of social media: the Boundary Regulation Principle, the Identity Integrity Principle, and the Network Integrity Principle. These principles can help courts, policymakers, and organizations create more consistent and effective rules regarding the use of social data.

Find on SSRN

Included in

Privacy Law Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.