User Rights should be governed
This blogpost will finish with a start-up idea which I think you should commit yourself to.
The other day me and my two neighbours and close friends, Oskar and Tim in our usual habit spent the tuesday night drinking green tea jabbering away on the big and small things in life.
Oskar is a lawyer, Tim a musician - together we can argue back and forth for hours.
This specific night the topic was the F8 changes in Facebook, more specifically the integration with Spotify. The burning issue was the instated requirement to connect with Facebook to be able to use Spotify.
My position was that while I can understand why so many become upset I assume that this was a part of the deal and that at the end of the day more upsides were introduced than the downsides - and yes, I’m speaking about both users and shareholders.
The problem that occurs is an old one, how can I as a user be sure that the time I invest in a service will continue to provide me with an experience that meets my needs or even exist. For instance; Tim doesn’t even hold a FB-account. Does he have no rights to his account?
I’m a firm believer that companies should be free to plan their business in whatever way they find fitting, assuming that no laws are broken, to best meet their share holders will, even if this sometimes comes at the price of the users. But as companies are growing to become more important political factors than countries or even unions of countries; where change occur on such a regular basis that a legal system no longer can hold a viable chance to remain balanced yet up-to-date a need for other ways to regulate the companies relations to its user emerge.
This becomes increasingly clear if you take some time to actually read some User Agreements (just follow the link by the checkbox you pass by in every sign-up). I know this because I’ve recently spent some time writing the first “User Agreement” for Tictail, in the process i read-up on the competitions agreements too.
Paragraphs like
You can review the most current version of the Terms of Service at any time at: http://example.com/legal/terms.html . Company Name reserves the right to update and change the Terms of Service by posting updates and changes to the company website. You are advised to check the Terms of Service from time to time for any updates or changes that may impact you.
are more or less standard and although I would argue that this is not possibly legally binding in any European country it still displays a substantial deficit in how webcompanies have settled to regulate their relations to their users.
What I’m arguing for here is a third-party instance where companies can post their User-Agreements. This instance should include a standard set of guidelines deemed to be acceptable so that companies only need to post additonal rules specific for the services provided. The service should also include the oppprtunity for the community to comment, share and discuss the guidelines as well as follow a roadmap/repo to see what additions are being considered and when they will become active.
If a company agrees to use the basic set of guidelines and keep any additions updated via the service and according to its guidelines an authentication should be administered - this authentication would preferably be visible directly in any (modern) browser.
This would be a killer service and follows my believe that the future internet giants will no be services but rather infrastructures…
