The Future of Reputation | Daniel Solove | Talks at Google

Like they never could express themselves before to a wider audience than they could ever express themselves before. But there's a dark side to the story, and that is one of the things that I'm going to spend today.

Talking to you about.

I begin my book talking about someone who has become known as the Dog Poop Girl. Some of you might have heard of her, some of you might not have heard of her, but she's famous. She's known by millions of people across the world.

The world.

The story begins on a subway train in South Korea. A young woman is on the train. She has a little dog with her. The dog poops on the train. She's in a hurry. She doesn't have time to clean up after her dog. And so she leaves the train and leaves the poop. Well, this was rather rude. And people on the train thought she shouldn't be able to get away with such rude behavior. Someone took her picture with a cell phone camera and they put it. And soon after that, people started annotating the picture with personal information about her. They identified her, they found contact information about her. People criticized her. They started harassing her by calling her. Ultimately, she dropped out of her university because of some of the harassment. They made posters of the event based on the picture. This even went beyond that. They did more things. They created mock up posters that you can see there where they used Photoshop and other things. They also. It got written about in the media. It got written about all throughout Korea in the newspapers, started covering the story. It went beyond South Korea. It actually spread to the United States and other countries in the world started writing about the Dog Poop Girl. The Washington Post, for example, wrote a story about the Dog Poop Girl. It was on Boing Boing. I blogged about it. People all across the country started blogging about it. All across the world started blogging about the. The Dog Poop Girl. This is just one example of how the Internet is changing our lives. In the past, if this incident happens, someone would have just told her off.

Said that you're being really rude. People would have given her an angry glare.

But now the Internet allows a posse to draw together across cyberspace and mete out justice forever. This woman is going to be known.

As the Dog Poop Girl.

Life today is presenting us with a bit of a paradox. Information is flowing freely, enhancing our freedom and autonomy, but I think it's also.

Making us less free. How and why is this happening?

Well, my bloggers, I blog with a couple other folks and we blog primarily about the Law. We blog about policy. I blog about privacy and other things. And other. Other blogs that I read often blog about the law and blog about politics and political issues or about technology and other things. But these are just one fraction of the blogosphere. There's a lot of blogs that consist of people's personal lives, their intimate details about what they're doing. This is a diary. And in the past, people would actually keep diaries, and you'd shove them into your dresser drawers, and some of the diaries would actually come with locks on them so you could lock them up. But now diaries are just so 20th century because we've got blogs and social network websites, and people are using these things as diaries, especially younger people.

And when people are spilling out the.

Details about their personal lives online, it's not just their lives that are being captured.

It's also details about other people, because.

Our lives are intertwined with the lives of others. So people are revealing details about their other friends, about their family, about their enemies, about their co workers, about their bosses, about their students, about their teachers. And so we're having this onslaught of personal information online. Now, when I was in high school and college, I didn't have a website of my own. I didn't have a blog. There wasn't MySpace or Facebook. I owned a computer that looked like this. This is my computer, and I looked like this. Needless to say, life was really, really hard back in those days. But the generation growing up today, they have blogs. They use social network websites. I put this cartoon in the book. The cartoon says, well, yes, we could read your blog, or you could just tell us about your school day. And this illustrates a growing fact about the blogosphere, an interesting fact, and that is under one estimate, about 50% of blogs are by children under the age of 19. Now, I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to imagine all the things that you did during high school and college that you want to forget. And most likely, though, you're lucky, because it probably has been forgotten. That's because it was stored in this device. But today, on the other hand, the people growing up, the people in college.

The people in high school, their information doesn't disappear.

It doesn't get forgotten. And thanks to you guys at Google, it is available for anyone to see by just plunking your name into Google. I call the generation growing up Generation Google. This is a generation that now can find out information about anybody else by putting names of people into Google. And if you put their names into Google, and if they have a non Common name. You're going to be able to pull up a lot of information about them, information fragments. And these information fragments are going to follow them around wherever they go. They could go to Australia and guess what? You can still do a Google search about them. They're going to be forced to live with a detailed record, beginning with childhood, that's going to stay with them for their lives. Searchable and accessible from anywhere around the world. There's going to be more people with more information. As this next generation who are putting all this information about themselves and others online grows older, this information is going to keep growing. It doesn't exist for a lot of us because we just missed out on the kind of blog and social network revolution. But not the folks growing up today. I want to tell you another story, another anecdote about what's going on. You might have heard of someone known as the Star Wars Kid. Very probably most of you have seen this video. This is a kid, a 15 year old kid, he's in Canada. He decides to film himself waving around a golf ball retriever pretending that it's a lightsaber. The only problem was that he didn't have George Lucas choreographers and so he didn't look particularly adept when he was waving this thing around. He was stumbling and bumbling around and it was quite humorous and he was quite awkward doing it. Well, some of his tormentors found this video and they decide to put it online on a YouTube like site where you could share videos.

And what happened next was amazing.

People start downloading it. In fact millions of people start downloading it.

And actually more than millions, but tens.

Of millions of people start watching this video and they start commenting about the video, they start mocking this kid, making fun of this kid, laughing at this kid all across the world. And in addition, they make videos with special effects. They add Star wars music, they make the lightsaber glow. They put in other characters from Star wars into the thing. They have text in the beginning of the video that streams across the galaxy announcing the video. This is just part of it because they also make various other mash up videos. In fact, this is just a snippet from what you can find about Star wars kid and YouTube. I couldn't fit them all on the screen, but here some you can see various remixes in the Matrix and combining it with all sorts of things. So this thing really becomes viral around the world forever. This kid is going to be known as the Star Wars Kid. No matter where he goes. You do a Wikipedia search for his name and you pull up his entry and it's on the Star wars kid.

Thousands and thousands of websites are talking about him and have information about the video and pictures of him and mockery of him.

And it's one thing to be teased in high school, but now imagine being.

Teased by the entire world. And that's the very sad story of the Star wars kid.

One more example, you might have heard of the Washingtonian case. This is a case that involved Jessica.

Cutler, who's an intern at the U.S. senate.

She's working for a senator. An attorney in her office starts going out with her. Little does he know that she has a blog.

And she started this blog, and she's.

Blogging about her relationships and her dating life. And she's got quite an active dating life. She's been seeing and having sex with six different men.

And she blogs about this in explicit detail.

And in particular, she focused a lot.

On her sexual relationship with this guy that she was going out with. The story involves spanking. It involves the talk about handcuffs. Needless to say, he was not very happy about this story.

What happened was her blog linked to by Wonkhet.

Wonkhat is a very popular political blog, a kind of inside the Beltway gossip blog.

When Wonkhet linked to it, the story really went global.

Tons of people flocked to the story. Jessica Cutler got a lot of attention, media attention. She did a Playboy spread, for example. She also got a book deal. I have a picture of her book there called the Washingtonian, named after her blog. She got six figures, reportedly $300,000 advance for doing that book. So things were quite good for Jessica.

Unfortunately for the guy who she blogged.

About, he wasn't very happy about all this. He decided to sue her for invading his privacy.

Ultimately, the lawsuit has been staged.

She's declared bankruptcy. So the suit really is sort of stopped. And it hasn't really gone anywhere because it's in limbo, given her bankruptcy declaration.

So. So we're starting to see what I.

Call the future of reputation.

And one thing that we can think about is that is it the case.

That the transformation of gossip into something that's more indelible, something that's more widespread, something that's more accessible?

Maybe this is a good thing. Is this actually something that is problematic, something we should be concerned about? Perhaps we should be happy that we'll.

Be able to have more information about people.

We won't be able to hide discreditable.

Secrets about ourselves, and we won't be able to.

Other people won't be able to hide their secrets from us because we can plug their name into Google and find out about them. One of the prevailing mottos of the information age is that more information is better. And maybe this is true. But I think that personal information taken out of context can lead to hasty judgments that don't necessarily lead to more truth about a person's character. I think ironically, that the libertarian norms of the Internet that are leading to freedom and autonomy can also paradoxically lead.

To a world of oppression and greater social control.

And they can do this, I think, by making it really impossible for us to escape from the shackles of our past, to escape from mistakes that we.

Might have made in the past, and we might never be able to fully start anew. And it's taking that away from people, and I think that's making them less free in certain instances.

So I'm a law professor and so.

The first question I think is what.

Can the law do? And the answer, unfortunately is rather messy.

And it's not particularly satisfying because I love to have the rabbit in the hat solution and say, here it is.

The grand solution that's going to solve.

All our problems and we can all go home and smile and say, problem solved.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's such an easy solution in this case.

I think there's a lot of very problematic and messy solutions. And ultimately I think there are three general ways that the law can go. And I ultimately adopt one of those.

Directions, which is imperfect in itself. But I think the other two are even worse. And here they are. The first is what I call the libertarian approach. This is basically the hands off approach that by and large, if you get.

The law involved, law is going to make things worse, it's going to mess things up. We really should let things work themselves out themselves and try to keep the law as far away as possible.

I think the problem with this is it basically runs a default to protect free speech and lets people say whatever.

They want with impunity.

And I think that's a problem because it's doing nothing to address the fact.

That people's reputations are being harmed and, and that people want some way to.

Vindicate their harmed reputations and we want some way to prevent people from having.

Gossip and rumor spread about themselves online.

Another approach is what I call the authoritative approach. The authoritative approach is basically sort of very restrictive approaches that can.

I don't know if it's raining, but very restrictive.

Approaches that can ban things and limit things. And we're starting to see this approach.

Being proposed by various legislatures and others.

Who say, well, let's try to make.

ID requirements to use social network websites.

Or let's try to put restrictions on.

People'S ability to speak anonymously on the Internet.

I think these approaches are way too.

Strong, they're way too authoritarian. I think they too chilling a free speech, which I really don't want, overly chill. So I think those approaches are problematic. When the law gets involved in that way, I think it goes too far.

So ultimately what I recommend is a middle ground approach. And that middle ground approach is basically using what's known as the privacy torts to help protect people. And privacy torts are basically lawsuits, causes.

Of action for people who are harmed, and they can bring a suit against somebody for that harm. And I think it's much, much better than kind of top down government regulation.

And restrictions, because at least this is at the impetus of a private individual.

Who'S harmed to actually then go to court and say, hey, I want a remedy.

And one of the there's a few difficulties that make the solution we have.

To work out with the solution.

First is the fact that the privacy torts.

That are out there, there's a number of privacy torts that are recognized in most states. Torts that would protect, for example, the dissemination of true information about yourself, that's embarrassing and highly offensive.

There's actually a tort to protect against that. But these torts are very weak. They're currently extremely weak and don't work.

Very well on the Internet especially. And so that's a problem.

Another problem is that we don't want too many lawsuits. So if we strengthen the privacy torch as I recommend, doesn't that lead to a lot of people then going to.

Court and suing and suits cost a lot of money. They take a long time to resolve. It's very messy and it's great for lawyers, but for the litigants it's often really, really bad.

And so I don't want a lot of lawsuits.

I don't want to invite everyone to rush to the court every time they're harmed.

So what I want is for the law to establish the principle that if.

You blog, you should be careful about the consequences. You should be careful not to harm other people as you're blogging about them. You should think about it and do it responsibly. I want to have that norm brought to people so people recognize the norm.

I also want people to have an incentive to work things out informally. If someone's harmed by information before it.

Goes Viral across the net.

I want them to be able to take it down and have an incentive to take it down if someone's harmed before things become like the Washingtonian case.

Of the Star wars kid, where it gets out of control and then someone's really harmed by it.

And so ultimately, what I want is lawsuits to kind of be a credible threat, but I really don't want them to materialize. So I kind of want them there and to be viable, but not many cases actually to proceed to lawsuit.

I want most to be settled. I want most of the work to be informal and the law just to set the norm. Be careful when you blog, when you use social network websites. Don't just spread information with impunity.

And so how do we do this? Well, one of the challenges is that currently the privacy torts are very ineffective. They rarely work. And the reason that they don't work is that they're laboring under antiquated understandings of privacy. And this affects not just the privacy.

Torts, but it affects the law more generally when it comes to privacy.

So I'd like to spend just a few moments talking to you a bit about what I think are some of these outmoded understandings of privacy and the way that we can invigorate a kind of new understanding of privacy that I think might actually make some headway in.

Addressing some of these problems.

So the first aspect of privacy that.

I want to talk about, the first thing that I want to get into.

Is the notion of privacy in public, or something that I call a kind.

Of binary understanding of privacy. And this is this antiquated notion that the law has that privacy is either.

Public, or things are either public, or they're either private, and that's it. And so you separate things into these two realms of public private. The idea that the law currently embraces is this, that if you expose something to the public in any way, it's no longer private. If information is known by others, it can't be private. If information, if you're out in a.

Public place and someone sees you do something, captures a photo, it's not private. That is the current understanding of the law.

The problem with it is that there's a lot of things that we do out in public where we don't expect.

The information to be gathered or captured and put online.

An example would be, suppose you're at.

A drugstore and you're buying various hygiene products and other products, and someone comes.

Along with a camera, takes a picture of the contents of your car, takes A picture of you, posts it online, identifies you, and says, here are the.

Items that you're buying, here are the prescription drugs that you're using, and so on.

And the law would say, hey, you're in public, no expectation of privacy there. And it is true, right? You're in a public place, you're in a drugstore, other people can see you. The store clerk is going to see all the items that you buy. So the information's not completely private, but there's an expectation there. There's an expectation that no one around you is going to care, that no one's going to connect your identity and link it up to that information, that that information, by and large, you're anonymous in the drugstore, that no one else there is really going to know who you are and be scrutinizing what you're buying. And the problem is that that can get destroyed when someone puts it up.

In the blog in this way.

And so I think that we need.

To have a better understanding of privacy.

And get rid of this very simplistic and I think incorrect binary notion that the minute you're in a public place.

You no longer have any expectations of privacy. Another understanding of privacy is of.

Antiquated.

Understanding, is that privacy is tantamount to secrecy.

And I actually think that this idea.

Is similar to the binary notion. And the idea is this, that if.

You tell other people your secret and they decide to tell the world, blog about it, or tell other people that that's just your tough luck. You assume the risk when you tell something to your friends or you tell something to a spouse and that they are going to possibly betray you. And if they do tough on you, they might betray you and the law won't do anything to protect you against that. Well, think about this.

An example.

Suppose you go to your doctor and you tell your doctor information. The doctor says, cool blog fodder. Well, wait a second. There are laws that protect against your.

Doctor from blabbing about your secrets. Doctors are understood to have a duty to maintain the confidentiality of your information. They can't just spread it out as they want to do.

You can sue them for a tort called breach of confidentiality. And this tort is viable in most states and you can actually prevail. And they can't just disclose your confidential information. But the tort doesn't apply when it comes to your friends or it comes to other people, like your spouse or.

A lover or others.

The interesting thing is that in England it does. England has rejected a lot of the privacy torts that were created in the.

United States, but they do have a.

Similar tort, breach of confidentiality. But their tort, in contrast to the tort in America, applies to friends, to family, to lovers, including if you're having an affair with someone, they have a duty of confidentiality. It can be sued if they disclose your personal information and details about that affair. It's understood that if there's an expectation that these facts are confidential, the law is going to protect you there. Maybe it should apply here. Maybe we should look over to England and say they have maybe an interesting idea. And if that applies, that provides people with some ammunition to say, look, you just can't breach my secrecy and spread.

My secrets on your blog that, you know, you have an expectation of confidentiality. And so that might help protect. If we understood privacy to be confidentiality and got rid of this notion that if you're betrayed, it's your tough luck.

The last idea of privacy I want.

To talk about is an idea of control. And I'll begin with an anecdote to sort of talk about. And this is with Dr. Laura Schlesinger.

Dr. Laura, you might have heard of her. She's a very well known conservative radio talk show host.

She talks a lot about family values and she's very strict and blunt about family values.

Well, one of her ex lovers from.

20 years before had naked pictures of her from an affair that they had. And apparently he must have been running short on money. He decides he needs to raise a buck.

So he sells these pictures to a video voyeur website.

And the video voyeur website is excited. They post the pictures. They're delighted to have these pictures of Dr. Laura.

So they post them on their site. Well, Dr. Laura is not happy about this. She sues them, trying to get them.

To take the pictures down, claiming that it's an invasion of her privacy. She sues under the privacy torts and.

The court says you lose. They have first amendment rights to display these pictures. Now the interesting thing is that other.

Websites were also looking at this site.

And saying, we really want these pictures too. So they copied the pictures and they start posting some of the Dr. Laura pictures. Well, the guy who was running the video voyeur website was very upset and so he decides to sue the other website and guess what? He wins. And the reason that he wins is because he's got copyright law on his side. The person who takes the photograph has copyright protection in the photograph. And because the person who took them sold them to that voyeur website, now.

The Voyeur website owns the copyright.

The person like Laura, the person to whom the picture. The person of whom the picture is taken, they only get privacy protections. And let me tell you, if someone gave you a choice between privacy protections and copyright protections, go with copyright, because you're gonna get all these protections. Copyright law gives a vigorous amount of protection, and privacy law gives some but a limited amount. And I, and I invoke copyright law not because I think that privacy should be protected with copyright, because I'm not a big fan of current copyright. I think it goes way too far. I think it's way too restrictive.

I think courts have gone almost insane when it comes to the kind of overprotection of copyright.

But the reason I invoke it is because far too often when it comes to privacy, I hear arguments such as, there's nothing the law can do. The information's out there, you can't stop it. There's absolutely nothing. It's just once it's out in the public, it's just out. Cat's out of the bag. Tough luck. And the interesting thing is copyright law doesn't think that way. Copyright law says no. In fact, even if information's out there, there is something that the law can do. The law can provide some protection. Now, it might be too much protection in certain cases. It might not always work, but at least the law does try to establish.

A regime of controlling information in the copyright context.

In the privacy context, it seems the.

Law is like, well, we can't do anything. The law can't do anything.

But it can. And that's why I invoke this, to illustrate that, in fact, there are things.

The law can do to provide people with rights to control their information.

We give strong rights to the takers of the photographs, but not to the people to whom the photographs, who are the subjects of the photographs, the people of whom the photographs are taken. But we don't have to break things.

Out that way if we don't want to.

In so a way of sort of.

Thinking about things that we actually can give greater control to privacy and law. It is possible if we want to.

A little bit about speech, because this.

Is a big part of the book. I'm going to only talk very briefly.

About this, and that is there's a tension here. We have really important values on both.

Sides when it comes to this issue.

Which is what makes this so interesting and also makes it really hard and messy, because it's not like there's an.

Evil villain on one side and a good hero on the other.

We've got two really valuable things and.

They'Re in conflict with each other.

On the one hand, we have privacy and reputation. On the other hand, we have free speech and we don't want to overprotect privacy and then chill speech. On the other hand, what I think the law is currently doing is I think it's overprotecting speech and not protecting privacy enough. So we want to tilt the balance a little bit more into privacy, but we don't want to push too hard because then we start infringing too much on speech. So it's a very, very delicate weighing.

That I'm trying to do, which ultimately makes nobody happy. But I think we need to do a better job at weighing that.

Well, a current one example of how I think the law might go too.

Far in protecting speech is something known as the Communications Decency Act, Section 2. Some of you might have heard a bit about this.

This is the law. It's a federal law that immunizes websites and blogs and ISPs for information, for content that's posted by others. So the idea would be on my.

Blog, you can comment anonymously, anyone can write a comment.

And suppose you decide to write a nasty comment about your co worker on.

My blog, or you decide, oh, I.

Want to post a naked picture of.

My co worker on my blog, and.

That person sees that comment, writes to.

Me and says, you know, I really don't like that comment. This is defamatory or hurtful or this is invasive of my privacy.

Well, the first aspect and where this law is very clear is that if you post that comment on my blog, I'm not going to be held liable.

For your posting that comment. That's you speaking, not me.

And so I shouldn't be responsible for.

Everything you might post on the blog.

And that's what Section 230 says. However, courts have applied it further, they've applied it beyond that, and they've applied it this way, that even if I know that this information is invasive of privacy, even if you call me and beg me to take it down, you say, look, come on, it's a new picture, will you take it off? And I say, nope, I like it. I like it on my blog. Courts have read 230 to also immunize me under that circumstance. Now that's a big difference between online and offline speech. Because offline I'm going to be liable online, this law immunizes me and I'm not liable even though I know that.

That information is defamatory or that it is invasive of privacy.

And I think that's going too far. An example of this is that we're seeing sites.

You might have heard about this one in the news. It's been in the news a lot lately.

It's called Juicy Campus, and it's basically a website that solicits gossip and rumor from various college campuses. So it's coming to. It's at many college campuses, spreading all.

Across the country to various college campuses. And so once it goes to a particular college, you can start posting gospel gossip about all your friends and enemies on the site.

And it deliberately solicits it. And they don't post anything themselves. They're using Section 230 and they're claiming, look, we're immune under Section 230. We're not the ones posting it. But please give us all your juicy gossip and give us everything you can so we can put it up on our site. Now, I think sites like this are exploiting their section 230 immunity by trying to basically encourage and facilitate gossip and.

Then try to escape any accountability or responsibility for doing that. And for basically their whole model is basically to get information about people in this way. And I think this shows some of.

The excesses of, I think, pushing too hard on the speech side of the.

Balance, and a better balance between speech and privacy, I think could help protect us and stop sites like this.

So basically, that is a little taste.

Of some of the issues that I talk about. I could go on a lot, but I'd rather spend the rest of the time taking some of your questions and having a discussion with you about some of these issues. So I'll end here and take some questions.

Yeah. Hi. Thank you very much for coming and talking on this. Something you haven't talked about is the reputation of groups and the related concept of hate speech, where I can read on the web in two versions. One is, all illegal aliens do these horrible things. It's untrue. But no one's in a position to really sue. And the other is sort of selective shaming and selective norming, where you put up, you know, this Mexican killed and raped this woman. Look what they're like. Or this is what gays do at their pride parades. But no one's showing pictures of what straight people do at Mardi Gras parades, which are pretty much the same. Is there any? I know in some countries they're beginning to talk about hate speech laws, or they have them, and those concern me a great deal. And yet I don't see any recourse to the propagation of, you know, un. Unfair reputation, destruction of groups at all.

Yeah, I steer clear of that issue because I actually think it's somewhat of a different issue. And for me at least I get very concerned when it comes to the.

Idea of sort of group libel or attacks on groups because it comes very.

I think it gets very, very into the free speech territory.

I think these things are abhorrent. I think they're despicable. I think certainly people who say things.

Like that should be shunned.

I'm very concerned about suits against that because people say all sorts of offensive things and opinions about others that are very offensive. But I don't think that the law should restrict that. I think that's where the free speech side of the balance for me at least comes in and says, I think when it comes to hermeus specific person and spreading information about them, I think that the law is better capable of coming in and helping the balance. But when it comes to speech against groups, I think that shuts down too much discourse if every time you say something that generalizes about a group in a negative way, that you could be facing a lawsuit or facing a restriction. And so I'm typically not in favor of laws that restrict speech, even if it's nasty and hateful. So there was an interesting news piece recently about Amazon reviews and how 1.

Star reviews seem to have a disproportionate weight than a five star review would. And I'm wondering if you could comment on this particular case of Yelp. And if you're a small business owner.

Is there anything you can say to.

Yelp that'll make them take action to.

Take down a review?

Because they will take down reviews in some cases.

Yeah, I don't know specifically how Yelp will work. I mean, every site will have its own system for taking down reviews. My own personal experience with Amazon was I wrote a book called the Digital person back in 2004 and some fool wrote this review. I mean, he gave me, I think.

Actually he didn't review it that bad.

He gave me four stars or something like that. But he had this obnoxious review comment.

Which basically said, I haven't read the book, but it's published by Reed Elsevier, which is owned by Lexic Nexus, one of the big database companies, and therefore.

Everything suspect or whatever, and it wasn't published by them, it was published by NYU Press.

So it was false. And the guy admits he hasn't read the book.

So I wrote to Amazon, I said.

Take this garbage down.

Nothing.

So I do think that site should.

Should be better about that.

I mean, the danger there is, is my complaint justified?

I don't know. It wasn't that harmful.

But it's still false.

It's still spreading false information about the book. At the end of the day, I don't think it really harmed me all that much. But yes, every site has issues about when they, what information gets put up and taken down.

And in particular in the corporate reputation.

Context, there's a lot of sites that you can put reviews of things like, you know, Travelocity and other sites where you can put up reviews of hotels and businesses.

I'm less sympathetic to the businesses when.

It comes to harms on the reputation. I think they stand in a little bit of a better position than individuals to fight back when the reputation's harmed. And so I know that it can be very damaging to a business if you're a small business or own a small hotel and someone savages it online and gives it one star, it could really affect them.

On the other hand, I'm very wary.

Of the fact that I think it's.

Very important for people to be able.

To criticize and rate their experiences with various businesses. They don't like the customer service at a particular company, they should be able to voice that concern. And so I get very, very wary of businesses using their muscle and their power to try to silence their critics. And so I typically come out when it comes to businesses on the side of free speech. And I don't really want to see the protections of privacy and defamation applying to them. I really. The core concern, I think the people who need the most protecting are individuals.

I'm sort of wondering what you have, how you think about public officials, particularly public officials who are like going after invasive laws but who are like, you know, closet gays or something, you know, with. There's just all kinds of interesting things where somebody, some public official is advocating something and then they're caught doing the exact opposite of what they say. They're, I mean, how do you, how do you, what's your take on that?

That's a very interesting issue. Part of me thinks, great, they got what they deserved, you know, the hypocrite. But part of me also thinks too is that it is possible to advocate certain things even if, you know, you.

Yourself are, you know, you could be self hating, let's say it also could be that.

I also think it's important that we preserve some kind of private life for.

Public officials, too, that it gets me very nervous when we just sort of say there's absolutely no private life at all for public officials. You have to live in this fishbowl.

It affects the kind of people who.

Run for public office.

And I think it can deter good.

People from running for public office to have to worry about having to have all this information out there and having to be smeared and having all this other stuff that might be true and.

Some might be false, but having this.

And maybe that's just a product of life in the modern age, that in order to get into politics, you've got to subject yourself to that.

But I think it's unfortunate.

I do think that when it comes to public officials, you know, the level of protection should go much lower. I think that they are public figures. I think it's very important for transparency that we know information about them. But I don't go so far as to say they shouldn't have any privacy whatsoever and they can advocate certain views. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, people electricity them based on the views that they say and the policies that they're promoting. And, you know, even if they personally don't do that, it's still the fact that voters put them in office to do these particular things. And so, yes, it's good information. Wow, look at the hypocrite. On the other hand, I mean, the voters are the ones who are putting these folks in office who want these policies done. And so I do think we want to preserve some bit of private life for them. Ultimately, this is a very, very tough issue, and I vacillate all the time on it and haven't really come to, like, a solid position on it.

But there's also. I mean, it's not just personal things. There's also like the advocacy of policy and then taking lobby money for the exact. It's like you connect the dots and this is why this person is doing this.

And they say, I think all that should be. I think lobby money and all that should be public. And so I think that when it comes to that, I don't think is a measure of privacy, obviously. I think that should all be transparent, and I think sort of any money trail should be known and linked up to the various lobbyists. And I think we don't have enough information about the influence of lobbyists on the process. And so that's where I think transparency should be at most robust. Where I do think privacy should come in is I don't think every detail about A politician's sex life should be fair game for the media. That's where I get a little bit restricted. But lobbyists, I think. Absolutely.

Hi. So in a perfect world, it'd be great if everybody behaved themselves on these websites and treated each other with respect and didn't defame each other. But that doesn't happen and we obviously want to err on the side of free speech. So I'm wondering in your research or in the book, if you talk about examples of websites that get this part. Well, like how to handle reputation. Like, is it a matter of letting the users police the site themselves or providing some good examples, or maybe like a Wikipedia style thing where people can clobber the ones that are saying bad things. Just curious to see if you know of some good examples in that regard.

Yeah, well, I do talk a bit.

About Wikipedia and some of the struggles they've had with information because they get a lot of bad information and people trying to manipulate the Wikipedia entries. And I talk about the sort of very notable defamation case that they had where a guy claimed that he was defamed on there and was in fact false information was spread.

And Wikipedia has sort of tried to.

Struggle with developing a system to try to rein in some of the abuse and correct it. And sometimes the information gets corrected quickly, sometimes it doesn't. I haven't seen a perfect system yet. I think that, you know, sites like Wikipedia are trying and I think making good efforts.

I think there's an interesting trade off when it comes to Wikipedia and that.

Is the trade off of allowing anyone openness and accountability and anonymity and accountability come into conflict.

You know, the more open that you.

Want something, the more anonymous to allow anybody to edit it, the less trustworthy that information might be, because no one staking their reputation on the line for that information. And so, you know, and I think.

Wikipedia is an interesting example where you have a lot of very good information.

On Wikipedia and you also have a lot of really bad information too.

But there's enough good information that we trust it because if it has too much bad information, people stop reading. People wouldn't trust the site. If it's 90% false, you wouldn't use it. So it's useful because there's a lot of truth and it generally is true, but that also makes the errors more.

Harmful and that we expect it then to be true. And there's this little bit that isn't. We could be duped into thinking that it's false. And so the idea is, how do we create that kind of accountability and keep an open system. And I think they've really been struggling with that over sort of, you know, who gets what powers and who can be anonymous and who can. And who can edit an entry and not. And so I don't know the full answer, but I do think that there are some sites that are trying and I think that they're one that is trying to make some headway in this thing. And some others will take comments down. And ebay has an adjudication process when it comes to the reputation information. So we are starting to see the development of this, but I haven't found one that's perfect yet. But I do think there are some interesting models out there.

Thanks.

So obviously the Internet's global and what that means that, you know, multiple jurisdictions have interests in regulating it and may choose different reputational sort of regimes. For instance, we've seen the British courts decide that they have jurisdiction over postings made by Americans, for example, in the US and so on, because they could be regular. And Britain, similarly with Australia. So to what extent are we going to see jurisdictional conflicts arise and how do we deal with those? How do we deal with the fact that, say, what the EU thinks is appropriate for privacy, reputation, gossip and so on? It may not be the same as what the US Thinks or what China thinks, for example?

Yeah, well, it's a great question. And the answer.

I think we're already starting to see this.

It's starting to see countries with stronger libel and privacy laws without something like the First Amendment, where plaintiffs run to those countries and do what's called libel tourism. To sue under very, very favorable laws that are would not fly in the United States because of the First Amendment? I think that's very troubling and problematic. What's the solution? How do we prevent this and how do we balance this? I don't know. I think it's a great issue. It's something that I've been thinking a bit about, but I haven't really come to an answer yet.

I think the difficulty is this, that.

Obviously, you know, I want to establish a nice ideal balance in the United States with the First Amendment protections on the one hand and privacy on the other, and the nice balance.

What if a country wants a slightly different balance?

Does that mean they have to do our balance?

Or what if they want a different one and they're harmed by something that someone writes in the United States or were harmed by something that another country writes? What if they believe in an absolute First Amendment with no protections of privacy information, should we be able to get a remedy?

Or should anyone who wants to defame someone or spread gossip about them just.

Write it in that country? I think that's a very, very difficult issue.

And I don't know the process by which a lot about the process of treaty making and how countries are going to come together to sort of work out a set of rules that would apply to everyone across the board, which is ultimately, I think, how it's going to have to work out. There's going to have some agreement about what the standard should be, especially when it is global. When anyone can write something about someone from other places, what do we do? And I wish I had a great answer for it, because I think it's a fascinating and difficult, difficult question. I don't know. I kind of like to see, by and large, the balance in the US Be the balance that we have in the world, because, you know, by and large, even though our law is flawed when it comes to protecting privacy, I do think that even though the balance.

I think, is out of kilter, I.

Don'T think it's dramatically out of kilter such that we're, you know, it's incredibly problematic and that I want to see strong First Amendment protections here. And I'd be very nervous about, you know, suits from countries that don't have anything like the First Amendment.

So I realize that the binary notion of privacy, public versus private, is probably antiquated, but I'm curious where you would draw the line in terms of the expectation of what is to be kept private. I mean, it seems too easy to retroactively say, well, I never thought they'd tell. If I keep a web blog, I don't expect anyone to read it because I'm a terrible writer. So if somebody, you know, does something about me and they use that against me, can I say, well, they're misusing my information?

Well, I think one of the difficulties is that people, when they blog, they don't seem to think about how out.

There it really is. And so there's a lot of instances, one example, where a journalist was surfing, surfing through public MySpace profiles and found information, contact information about teenage girls, and just would call them up and say, hi, I'm creep number five, and I've looked at your information, and they get all nervous and upset and worried and they call their parents and they'd be.

Very upset, and people are shocked.

Oh, my gosh, how can this be?

Well, you put it in a public.

Profile, and a lot of bloggers, you know, you're sitting at your computer and you don't really. It's hard to visualize.

If I'm speaking to an auditorium, I actually can see all the faces that I'm blogging to. But if I'm just sitting at my computer, yes, I kind of know that.

Could be thousands, anyone in the world could read it.

But it doesn't really sink in because the technology strips the kind of perceptual cues that really make you see that it is really public and it is.

Going out beyond just your few friends.

So I don't think it's registering for people.

And so I think that people might have okay motives when they put it up.

They might think, oh, I'm just sharing with a few friends. But I think we still need to.

Have the law inculcate a sense that if you make it public, it's out there and someone can find it and all it takes is a link from a very popular blog and it goes global. And so it's dangerous out there.

So think about when you put it.

On the blog, when you put it out in public on the Internet.

Think about that.

And I'd rather draw the line there and try to get people to think before they put it there than to put it there and just sort of hope that it doesn't wind up becoming viral and popular on the Internet.

I'm wondering if, if you see a difference or if there is legally a difference between how this works for adults and how this works for minors. Exactly what you just said. For example, a 10 year old doesn't have very good judgment and should we even expect them to have good judgment? Do the rules of free speech apply to children the same way that they, you know, maybe they should be tighter for minors or.

Well, I do think parents have a.

Say and should be involved when it comes to their kids. But I do think, you know, children have free speech protections too. And I don't think we should just stop kids from using the Internet. I think that especially in today's age, the Internet is just going to be a feature of life that you get used to even at a very young age. And so I don't think it's actually think it's good that young people blog and use social network websites. I don't think that's a bad thing. Inherently bad. I think they need to be. It's like driving a car. You need to be taught how to do it responsibly. You know, you have to understand the consequences. I think that parents should be involved in sort of monitoring what their kids are doing early on to make sure that they're not saying, you know, inappropriate things and revealing too much information or exposing information that's going to harm them. But I'm not a big fan of sort of the state playing the parent and sort of saying, thou shalt not do this. That I think is very problematic. I think at the end of the day, it's something I think parents should be involved in. But I don't like laws that stop people from saying what they want to.

Say, because a lot of people use.

These responsibly and are not spreading bad information. It's true that children's judgment is bad.

In certain cases, but they're adult.

That spread just as bad, if not worse, information out there, too.

So parents then if. I mean, the parents would be legally responsible then if their child is sued or whatever?

Yeah, they would be. And a lot, you know, if your child goes and, you know, beats up.

Another kid and injures them, they're sued.

The parents can be sued in those cases. So, yeah, parents can be responsible for torts that are committed by their children. And I think that's a good rule. It gets parents to realize we could be on the hook for this, and so we should make sure that they are educated about what the consequences are.