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A New Digital Manifesto
- kapnobatairza 7y agoWhat about the right to appeal / speak to a human arbiter? If you get banned from a major service like Google or Facebook or Amazon it can have major ramifications on your life.
- shaneprrlt 7y agoI think the right to communicate is a part of a right to freely express oneself, which would be much more meaningful to codify in my opinion.
- danShumway 7y agoWould you be willing to expand on that? My instinct is to think of self-expression as a subset of communication, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on what parts of self-expression aren't currently being encapsulated or covered.
- sixstringtheory 7y agoI'm trying to think of counterexamples to each approach. Can one express oneself without communication? Can one communicate without expressing something about themself, or, slightly more relaxed, without having someone perceive something about them?
- basch 7y agoDoes the right to freely express include spam?
- danShumway 7y agoNot GP, but forcing an email client to consume/host spam would violate their Right to Filter. > Users and communities have the right to share filters, whether those filters take the form of software, algorithms, or manually curated whitelists and blacklists.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI was with this right up to The Right to Modify. If I create something, I get to say how people use it. That's the core of the wonderful proliferation of software licences. If I don't want people to see the source code of something I write, either because I don't want to deal with the criticism or because I've hidden some malicious nasty in there, then that's my call. Anyone can choose not to execute my code on their machine, that's their call. Anything else ends up enforcing a defacto GPL on the world.
- danShumway 7y agoWithout the Right to Modify, it is very difficult to guarantee any of the other rights I've listed. Most of the rights I list have provisions explicitly outlining that users have the right to circumvent DRM, captchas, and other technological locks that prevent them from exercising their rights. Without the Right to Modify, anyone could restrict any of the other rights on this page just by flipping a few bits in software and calling it DRM. Imagine if a website operator could sue Gorhill because Ublock Origin circumvented anti-adblocking measures in clientside code.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThe problem is realistically, DRM exists to prevent unlawful access and use. Your "right" narrowly avoids the topic by claiming users only should have the right to circumvent that which prohibits access they're legally entitled to. However, imagine a term of service that only grants access to a website in exchange for viewing ads. (This is the implicit contract of ad-based web viewing from the beginning, but websites aside from some streaming video platforms have not really "enforced" the fact that users pay for content by viewing ads.)
- belorn 7y ago> imagine a term of service that only grants access to a website in exchange for viewing ads Lets first imagine that the term of service is fully understood by the users. The tracking is explained and understood, the trading of personal data, the auction of targeting advertisement to anyone, the lack of liability in case of malware. In that world it make sense that websites enforce the trade of access in return for all the above. Until then we have the wild wild west that is online advertisement without regulation, liability or contract between the user and the publisher.
- danShumway 7y agoHosted on Netlify, so https://web.archive.org/web/20191104180034/https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191104180034/https://anewdigit... for anyone running into problems related to their current CDN outage.
- joshiefishbein 7y ago> Users have the right to subvert software and platform restrictions that would force them to consume content that they do not wish to see, and to teach other people how to subvert these restrictions. Users have the right to distribute software that circumvent technological restrictions for the purposes of personal content filtering. How about "Users have the right to not use software that forces [...]"? I have a hard time agreeing with the idea that people agree to a ToS and then have a right to abuse the platform. Seems like that could lead to an inconsiderate/unsafe/unfair place for other people and stakeholders in that platform. I understand that anyone can do whatever they want whenever they wish and that it's up to the platform to battle "subversion" and misuse – but I don't believe it should be an indoctrinated imperative. This applies to most of what is found in "Right to Modify". I think there's truly a legal nuance to who owns what (especially when a lot of folks are currently renting their phones from their device manufacturers or service providers). The sentiment seems to elevate the end user and expose the software developers a bit more than I personally care for. There should be more emphasis on the responsibility of users to understand what they are getting themselves into. EDIT: I drew my guns too quickly and forgot to mention I appreciate most of the other points and its simple presentation. I see the OP in the comments and commend ya for taking the leap.
- kick 7y agoHow about "Users have the right to not use software that forces [...]"? I have a hard time agreeing with the idea that people agree to a ToS and then have a right to abuse the platform. Seems like that could lead to an inconsiderate/unsafe/unfair place for other people and stakeholders in that platform. I understand that anyone can do whatever they want whenever they wish and that it's up to the platform to battle "subversion" and misuse – but I don't believe it should be an indoctrinated imperative. Ads are war. Just as a user has a right to avoid them, a content publisher has a right to try and push them on people. Cat and mouse game. It's not "abuse" when ads that cost users to view (bandwidth costs; attention-cost) are blocked or pushed on people.
- ChristianBundy 7y ago> I think there's truly a legal nuance to who owns what (especially when a lot of folks are currently renting their phones from their device manufacturers or service providers). If you send me a webpage full of advertisements, I'm under no obligation to look at those advertisements or display them on my monitor. I don't think there's much nuance here. Maybe you could be more specific about the use-case you're thinking of? I can't think of a reason why the freedom to filter (alternatively, the choice to listen) takes much nuance at all.
- 323454 7y agoHow do you reconcile the right to communicate with the right to filter? If I want to publish something on someone's platform, and they don't want me to, who's "right" wins? Similarly with the rights to hide and to remember. I understand that rights are more like aspirational principles than concretely achievable properties, but I think this particular list of rights wants to give everyone everything. Maybe the author could provide some more colour on what specific situations they have in mind and how the rights would be used.
- kick 7y agoThe way that section is worded implies they have a right over the network, but not over every individual platform.
- danShumway 7y agoIn the US, we see this same conflict with Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. It's a real conflict that does complicate things, but it's not so much of an issue that we've needed to revise the US Constitution (yet ;)) My short answer is that where public communication (one-to-many) is concerned, the Right to Communicate: A) describes voluntary communication. It doesn't give you the right to force someone to listen to you, it gives you the right to share information with someone who wants it. (I would be open to modifying the language if that distinction isn't currently clear.) B) are designed to combat legal challenges (Facebook may ban you for talking about something they don't like on their platform, they shouldn't be able to sue you). C) are designed to draw attention to infrastructure and monopoly problems (the existence of one company that controls a large majority of web content is in itself a threat to these rights). These rights are purposely vague because I want them to be stronger than just my own opinion; I want them to be somewhat interpretable and adaptable. However, in my opinion if I want to publish something and I have to publish it on Mastadon instead of Twitter, I don't consider that to be a violation of my Right to Communicate. If Twitter becomes the only way to publish content, or it controls so much of the Internet that publishing outside of Twitter is infeasible, then in my opinion it's reasonable to start talking about antitrust. There's leeway there -- ISPs are always going to be gatekeepers just because of how the Internet is structured, so maybe we decide that it's OK to force Net Neutrality on them. In general though, we should break apart monopolies rather than force them to be neutral. Bear in mind that the Right to Communicate is also about the right to encrypt message contents and to conceal message recipients, and to circumvent platform restrictions that try to remove those rights. The right to publicly publish information is only part of that, and is (imo) an already relatively well established right that I don't lose much sleep over. Other people may disagree with that, but I don't think Twitter/Facebook have as much control over modern communication as is often supposed.
- glitchc 7y agoWhere's the right to forget? If someone takes a photo of my driver's license and posts it on their website, does their right to communicate (and remember) override my right to have that photo deleted?
- whytaka 7y agoPedantic but the wording would be, "The right to be forgotten".
- danShumway 7y agoYes. I realize that the privacy community is diverse, and different people have different opinions on this. In general, I've tried to be vague enough with how I stated rights so that they could be applied to multiple different situations. I wanted there to be a little bit of leeway and ambiguity. However, on this point in particular, I take a hard stance: > Users have the right to share information with others, to share indexes of that information with others, and to tell other people that the information exists. I explicitly mentioned indexes to respond to people who claim that forcing information to be de-indexed or removing it from search queries isn't the same as censoring that information. I respect people who believe that, but I think they're wrong.
- glitchc 7y agoAccording to your logic then, if I use a service to store personal artifacts online, then the vendor providing that service can use or modify those artifacts in any way they see fit. My only protection or recourse seems to be to limit participation to useless or irrelevant information. How is that any different from the present day Internet? Any digital bill of rights that doesn’t protect my rights to my own information is worthless.
- kick 7y agoThere's established precedent in the United States that photos of you aren't "yours." Any other circumstance means that journalists and others can't expose bad behavior without getting litigated.
- sjs382 7y agoAlong similar lines, John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996 is something I make a point to read often. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- zwieback 7y agoIs it implicit that these rules apply don't apply to the workplace or other situations that aren't public?
- danShumway 7y agoThat's a good question. My intention was yes, there is an expectation that if you're renting a computer on behalf of an employer or accessing their internal network, that's a different situation than using a personal device. In the same way, circumventing a captcha to automate logging into an account you own is a right I imagined being protected, but exploiting an XSS vulnerability to scrape private data behind a login is not. I would be open to having my mind changed on where that line is. I'm cautious about trying to nail down a very hard line about what is and isn't 'public', because I see some ambiguity (using a personal device for work, using EULAs to enforce non-disparagement clauses). With Right to Remember, I felt like I needed to at least allude to that distinction: > and archiving information that they have lawful access to. But I didn't feel comfortable drawing hard lines elsewhere. If I found a solid metric that I felt could be easily, universally applied, I'd be willing to adopt it.
- clamprecht 7y ago"the right to publicly publish..." seems redundant.
- danShumway 7y agoI've heard a lot of people in my own circles use the word publish to refer to posts on private platforms like Facebook that aren't publicly accessible. It is a bit redundant, but I wanted to be certain I got across, "you have the right to put information on the Internet where everyone can see it, not just to post in someone else's walled garden."
- rollinDyno 7y agoNietzche said something along the lines that we get the rights we fight for, and we will lose those we stop caring about. Are you willing to die for your right to, for example, filter? At some point the pile of rights will start conflicting each other and will also start becoming too costly to enforce. Sorry for being overly cynical but I stay hopeful that in the near future code literacy will be as common as alphabet literacy thus allowing anyone to circumvent these trespasses. Edit: I would expand the right to filter to include the right to sort. I was thinking about it earlier today when searching for what used to be a popular post on Reddit. I thought I'd find it by sorting by all-time top but the number of members community had grown considerably since that post was submitted there, making what used to be a very popular post actually insignificant. If I would've been able to sort I would've been able to normalize the votes count so that it is relative to the number of members in the community at the time of submission.
- megous 7y ago> Nietzche said something along the lines that we get the rights we fight for, and we will lose those we stop caring about. Are you willing to die for your right to, for example, filter? Whys such extremes? All you really need to be willing to do is to write some software to perhaps scrape data and then filter them locally. Certainly there's no need to die. Or did I miss something?
- Zamicol 7y agoThere's no date on this, or other contextual information. Wayback machine seems to suggest this is newly published. This seems to reuse a lot of material from the "Internet Citizen Bill of Rights" started sometime around Jan 27, 2016. https://github.com/Cypherpass/InternetCitizenBillOfRights/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/Cypherpass/InternetCitizenBillOfRights/bl... And there's a subreddit for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetBillOfRights/ https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetBillOfRights/ Daniel Shumway, please feel free to get in touch.
- danShumway 7y agoIt's all extremely mysterious! ;) I'm unaffiliated with the Internet Citizen Bill of Rights, this is the first I've heard of it. I don't have any major criticisms of the document, but I still probably would have written my own manifesto even if I had known about it. Some of these seem a little over-broad just based on a quick glance, and at the very least I would have wanted something with more detail than just headers and a one-sentence description. > For questions, comments, and criticism, write to <prefix-here>@anewdigitalmanifesto.com. If you have questions/comments you're uncomfortable posting on HN, I'm pretty sure that email address works, but I haven't really tested it.
- dfabulich 7y agoThis manifesto forbids moderators from banning users on a forum! It’s completely unworkable. I profoundly doubt whether the author has ever moderated a forum before, say nothing of a meaningful social media site. Why should we listen to any of this?!
- danShumway 7y agoBanning users from a forum is literally the second right I list. > Both users and communities have the right to filter and organize the content they consume and host https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter
- dfabulich 7y agoThat’s not what filtering means. Filtering is kill files, ignoring people you want to ignore. (Look at that icon, of a person plugging his own ears.) If I’ve banned you from my forum, you’ve lost your right to communicate there. If I can do that, if Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News can all “de-platform” you, all without violating your right to communicate, then the right to communicate means nothing.
- danShumway 7y agoSee the thread on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21444900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21444900 for more details on why the Right to Communicate and the Right to Filter are not mutually exclusive. The TLDR: - The Right to Communicate describes voluntary communication between multiple parties that want to communicate, not the ability to force someone to listen to you. - The Right to Communicate is not a right to access to every single private platform or community, any more than the Right to Modify is a invitation to hack 3rd-party computers. - Nevertheless, it is valuable to have a right that guarantees access to encryption, including encrypted metadata, and that enshrines a right to create, distribute, and host communication tools, including websites. If it's not clear to readers that filtering content includes filtering content sources, I'll look into making that text easier to understand. But I do know what the Right to Filter is intended to mean, because I wrote it.
- alexfromapex 7y agoOverall good but needs some tweaking
- nathias 7y agowhat about a right not to be manipulated (transparency of algorithms)