Virtual worlds and social networking sites are becoming increasingly more enticing to people who are all too willing to abandon their privacy for escape into alternate worlds on the Internet. The increasing allure of those sites makes it even more imperative that serious policy discussion center on the inherent loss of privacy, says Steven A. Hetcher, professor of law at Vanderbilt University.
In order to enter those sites, people must sign “terms of service” contracts which are not only difficult to understand, they are “unconscionable,” Hetcher says. He provided that controversial perspective as part of a panel discussion on “User-Generated Content” on Friday, Feb. 1, in Mountain View, Calif., at the 2008 Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal Symposium as part of a conference on “Internet Collaboration.”
Those service contracts often allow companies to gather a considerable amount of personal information from the participants. “What is needed is a more serious discussion and more serious policy debate on a national level,” said Hetcher, author of Norms in a Wired World (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He says at the very least the service contracts that people so willingly sign should be written in understandable language.
Meanwhile, multi-media companies lobby to put the onus on consumers to monitor themselves and resist the regulation that’s now sorely needed as technology makes Internet worlds more and more attractive, he said. College students on a Saturday night could experience going out on the town in South Beach without ever leaving their keyboard, for example.
“This is becoming an economy unto itself,” Hetcher said. Whole worlds are created online such as on the site Second Life, which is more than just a game but a chance for people to create a virtual world in which they actually own property and have an alternate life. That game led to the first lawsuit focused on ownership rights in a virtual world – Bragg v. Linden Labs.
“What I’m writing about is: Where is this going to go?” Hetcher said. “It’s a given that privacy is dead. People are giving it up voluntarily and they don’t even know what they’re signing.”
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