Digital Bill of Rights
The power of the web to transform people's lives, enrich society and reduce inequality is one of the defining opportunities of our time. But if we don't act now — and act together — to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering that potential.
The web is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had to transform our lives for the better. At Gluu we believe that you should have basic rights when you use the internet and the web. Whether the services you use are free or paid, companies need to respect your right to:
Online Privacy
We almost expect that companies we interact with online track our every move. We wouldn’t agree to that in our non-digital lives and shouldn’t accept it in our digital lives. The digital information you create online is your private property. Businesses need to respect your privacy, online and offline.
Reasonable data collection and user-friendly controls
Some technology products work better when they know some information about you, like your settings preferences or what country you live in. This makes our experience on these sites better. However, companies today collect whatever information they can about you and store it indefinitely. By default, how companies use your data should be reasonable and aligned with your expectations—we shouldn’t have to changes these options in settings. The control we are provided to control our privacy and the data collected about us should be easy to find and give you real ownership over your data.
A good example is that tech products rarely need to store your location history forever, but many do. A better default setting would be to store this data for a limited time, helpful to us— say 90 days. Give us the ability to Opt-In to allowing the company to store our data longer, if that is your choice. And, perhaps they pay a fee for the use of your data. Paying you for the use of your data has been discussed for many years. It’s not happening yet.
Simple ways to understand how your data is used
It is impossible to know how tech companies are using our data. Companies get personal information to improve your experience on a service, such as your IP address, name, and profile photo. But they should not be allowed to use the data in whatever way they want without your permission. Products ask for your phone number and email address so you can recover your account should you get hacked, but then will use this data to report your online purchases to advertisers. Ongoing transparency around data usage needs to become the standard of the future. Easy to use tools to see where our data is being used need to be part of every online service.
Easy data portability
Your information belongs to you. Products should make it easy for you to download everything they store about you. You should also be able to use your data with whatever service you prefer—for instance, taking your Facebook data to another platform. Some companies offer this functionality, but it can take advanced technical knowledge to move your data to another service. It can also be difficult to delete your data from a service without advanced technical knowledge. True data ownership should be transparent, allowing you to see, use, and easily move your data as you wish.
These are the values that Gluu stands by. We signed the Contract for the Web to show our support of the work the World Wide Web Foundation is doing.
To learn more about the Contract for the web, visit World Wide Web Foundation.