Bill of Rights?

Bill of Rights?

"Internet Bill Of Rights" not applicable to secushare.

Apparently SXSW spawned a Social Network Users' Bill of Rights. Let's look at the demands:

Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service.

We don't provide service so we don't have a privacy policy. You get our source code and it has privacy and service built-in without hidden passages or trap doors.

hellekin says: If you have to call for honesty, it's because there's a problem there, thus you can't trust services to be honest: you have to implement honesty in the code. Even there, nothing prevents the "honest service" from running modified versions of the genuine code …

Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.

Not applicable.

Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification.

We have no way to influence anybody's data. You can only delete it yourself.

Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility

If anything is missing from the source code you can fix it yourself, you don't depend on our spare time or good will.

Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies.

secushare is the most privacy-enhancing technology we know. Maybe Bitmessage can compete regarding distribution anonymity, but it comes at the price of massive overhead.

Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others.

You are not required to give any information at all, it just happens that secushare works best for you if your friends can be sure it is you. Therefore you either provide enough things and common friends that make it very plausible, or you ensure each one to be the real person offline, which is even better.

Control: Let me control my data, and don't facilitate sharing it unless I agree first.

Depending on the amount of trust you decide to put into each contact you make - each friendship you take to a digital level - you define how much of the data you bring to secushare becomes available to these people and to these people only. You may choose to advertize some data to friends of friends, therefore people you may not know yet or even your greatest enemies, but that is your conscious decision.

Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.

Since we are not a service, it is your friends that you have to worry about. As long as your contacts do not leak the data you made available to them, your privacy is safe.

Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data.

You don't have to obtain it. It's on your own computer, unless you chose to erase it irrevocably.

Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised.

That's what secushare is designed for. Only the devices of your intended recipients see your updates, nobody and nothing else.

Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.

We can try to draw some pictures on how secushare functions. But there is no situation where we have power over your data. It works the way the code says.

Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.

Technically you can do this freely, but it may not work out socially.

Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions.

If you feel you were punished by your software, you should check if your device is free from malware or the person or organization you have entrusted in providing your secushare executables are indeed trustworthy.

Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data.

Yes, we intend to implement distributed deletion of your data in such a case. It depends on your social network of friends to run an untampered secushare that will actually honor your wish.

So the Bill of Rights doesn't apply very well for a software that already belongs to you. At no time you actually depend on us, the producers of this software. You should view this as good news for you.

"Internet Bill Of Rights" considered evil.

We worry that the "Internet Bill Of Rights" could be a bad development as it pours cement on the thinking that humans need to devolve their rights to the folks who run the Internet and need to entrust them with anything, while it is largely ignored that we humans could ask for legislation that guarantees that all essential constitutional liberties are implemented in free software and free hardware directly under our only control, without requiring any data to travel unsafe servers.

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