Facebook & Ottawa reach privacy agreement

Facebook and Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart today announced an agreement to, among other things, "give users more control over the information they share with third-party applications like games and quizzes," Yahoo Tech News reports. The Vancouver Sun explains that what the commissioner objected to was that, currently, "in order to download popular games and quizzes, Facebook users must consent to share all their personal information, except their contact details. These companies, totaling nearly 1 million, operate in 180 countries." Now, app developers will have to "specify which categories of data" their software needs, and Facebook will give users the ability to "decide accordingly," Yahoo News says, adding that "users will also have to specifically approve any access Facebook applications have to their friends' information," subject to the friend's privacy and application settings." All that sounds pretty complicated, but the agreement also provides for better clarity. In its blog, FB says about the agreement, "We'll be making a series of improvements that include notifications and information about privacy settings and practices, additions to Facebook's privacy policy, and technical changes" as mentioned above.

I hope this agreement is a precedent for how governments and social-media companies work together. Not so much in terms of threatened legal action (though of course not to be ruled out) as in where governments get their information. The Sun reports that the Canadian government's "privacy probe began last year when the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa filed an 11-part complaint, alleging Facebook violated key provisions of Canada's private-sector privacy law." The model, here, is reputable companies working with informed policymakers from a basis of understanding the risks involved and arriving at what companies can in fact do about them.

FL teen a registered sex offender for sexting

Teens do not want a late-night fit of anger channeled into a few seconds' worth of clicks on a cellphone to lead to anything close to what happened to Phillip Alpert, who will be in Florida's sex offender registry until he's 43, CNN reports. He told CNN he had just turned 18, he was tired, and it was the middle of the night "when he sent a naked photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend [for 2½ years], a photo she had taken and sent him, to dozens of her friends and family after an argument." Arrested and charged with distributing child pornography, he was later convicted and "sentenced to five years' probation and required by Florida law to register as a sex offender." Please see the CNN article for how US states handle child porn crimes, which - unfortunately, until US policymakers come up with a better idea - is how sexting is dealt with under US state and federal laws. What makes this complicated for law enforcement is, sexting is not always impulsive behavior by teenagers who know nothing about the law. Sometimes it's premeditated and malicious (e.g., bullying) or even criminal (blackmail or sexual abuse), in which case, Catholic U. Prof. Mary Leary and other legal scholars believe prosecution of minors should not be taken off the table (see "Self-produced child porn").

I wonder if it would it help to look at how other countries are dealing with sexting. When a Toronto TV reporter contacted ConnectSafely today, I learned that Canadian child porn law is a little easier on juveniles - more reasonable, I think, even though "sexting" has barely hit the public radar there, he told me. He pointed me to a thoughtful Macleans magazine article, reporting that, in Canada, "it’s not illegal for two teenagers under the age of 18 to carry naked photographs of one another, provided it's [consensual activity and] for private viewing only." It becomes child porn when one of them sends it around, and charges are for that distribution not against the minor who took the photo, according to Maclean. I haven't seen reports on UK law where sexting's concerned, but I noted that "90 children in the UK have been cautioned [presumably by law enforcement people] as a result of posting sexual material of themselves or their underage friends online or on their mobile phones," according to The Daily Mail, which indicates to me that those 90 children weren't arrested and that UK law enforcement may be playing the largely educational role that the realities of adolescent behavior and development demand of law enforcement where sexting's concerned. [For some research-based tips on how to deal with sexting in the US, click here.]