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Europe getting tougher on social sites?

March 25, 2011 By Anne Leave a Comment

It looks like the European Commission will be adding teeth to its interaction with social media companies such as Facebook, whether or not they’re headquartered in Europe.
In a speech to the European Parliament, the EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, warned that “a US-based social network company that has millions of active users in Europe needs to comply with EU rules,” according to The Guardian, and those rules may be changing. She’ll be unveiling a “package of proposals” soon that “intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user.” Facebook would probably argue that it already provides users with extensive privacy settings, but Reding said “the burden of proof should be on … those who process your personal data.” Among other things the new legislation would reportedly give national privacy watchdogs “powers to investigate and launch legal proceedings against companies with services that target EU consumers”; ensure that privacy is baked into services and not added on later; outlaw the gathering of user data without users’ permission; and give users a sort of privacy statute of limitation. It’ll be interesting to see how the industry would manage that last one, which the Commissioner’s office says allows you to withdraw your consent to the use of your data, after which it’s gone for good, without a trace of it on any server anywhere.

This is “a revolutionary moment,” wrote John Carr, London-based senior adviser to the UN’s ITU, in his blog, partly because “the new sheriffs rode into town”: Neelie Kroes, vice president of the EC with responsibility for the EU’s Digital Agenda. She brought with her Robert Madelin as director general for Information Society and Media. New but not ingénue. Their “shared agenda for cyberspace is starting to become very clear, at least in my neck of the woods,” Carr writes. On March 16, “Madelin delivered an electrifying, radical speech. Everyone is now on notice. The future of self-regulation as the preferred means of making policy in the field of online child protection hangs in the balance.”

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Filed Under: Law & Policy Tagged With: Digital Agenda, European Commission, John Carr, Neelie Kroes, Robert Madelin, social networking, Viviane Reding

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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