"internet policy" entries

Although portable reputations, like single sign-on, appear to be
Internet’s golden future (both in terms of user participation and
commerce), they’re not likely to happen. Your reputation has to adapt
to the sites you visit in similar ways. A purely instrumental view of
reputation may be the most viable.

The most disturbing presentation of the day was by Danielle Citron of
the University of Maryland’s School of Law, concerning harrassment of
women online. A lot of women write under gender-neutral pseudonyms
that don’t permit them to be identified by name, or go offline
altogether. This denies them the benefits of reputation, including the
reputation that potential employers measure by doing online searches.

At the
symposium,
by and large, everybody agreed that your data should be available to
you and that the heuristics used to generate reputation should be
open. But participants pointed out that search engines are the only
really robust reputation systems available, and proposed that they
work only because they keep their heuristics secret.

Nobody at the symposium offered a great solution to the balance
between privacy and free-speech, which have to be rejudged repeatedly
in different contexts. An opt-in world is necessary to protect
privacy, but Hoffman pointed out that opt-out is required to develop
most useful databases of personal information. If search engines
depended on opt-in, we wouldn’t be able to search for much of value.

The tidal wave of grass-roots contributions to the Internet over the
past decade is what drives web administrators and users to ask the
fundamental questions in reputation.
These sorts of issues drew some 90 to 100 lawyers, technologists,
librarians, and others to a

Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace
at Yale University’s

Information Society Project.
The goal of a universal reputation may be unachievable in both theory
and practice. More to the point, it may be undesirable.