Virtual Rights Initiative

I thought I'd blog a little about the Virtual Rights Initiative (please excuse the current parlous state of our web site ; ), which I am involved with, along with Jaco Aizenman and Andy Dale:

In essence, the Virtual Rights Initiative is concerned with promoting the development of legislation to support people's right to self-determination online. We feel that people should be able to control the flow of their information as they wish, and that to acheive this end, legal initiatives will be a necessary supplement to technical approaches like the identity metasystem.

As a first, tangible step in this direction, we are hatching a plan to get people to put "VR request" badges on their blogs (much like Creative Commons license badges). These logos will hyperlink back to a page on www.virtualrights.org that describes a wish-list for web services (without being legally-binding like C.C., though—the contract forming is left up to each user and service to agree):

Virtual Rights Request

• I want the right to get a copy of all my data, at any time, from the web services I use

• I want the right to have all the data stored about in me in the web services I use made anonymous if I decide to close my account

• I want the right to determine to what extent the web services I use can pass on my information to other parties

We then plan create on the VR site a directory of sites deploying the badges, utilising Google/Technorati. This directory will act much like a petition, which we can pass onto big web services (Yahoo, Google etc.) to encourage them to "do the right thing" with their users' data.

We also plan to budget the VR Initiative for the next e.g. three years, and launch a Pledgebank appeal to fund it: our hope is that VRI can become a focus for a discussion on Virtual Rights issues that spans user, business, NGO, government and tech communities.

So, if you have any feedback on our plans, or—even better!—would like to get involved to help us out realising them (e.g. with our web solution design and implementation), please do get in touch (contact link in sidebar).