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Choose Privacy Week 2012: The Perils of Social Reading

Document Type

Blog Posting

Language

English (en)

Publication Date

2012

Publication Title

Intellectual Freedom Blog

Abstract

Sharing, we are told, is cool. At the urging of Facebook and Netflix, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill to “update” an obscure 1988 law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”). Facebook and Netflix wanted to modernize this law from the VHS era, because its protection of video store records stood in the way of sharing movie recommendations among friends online. The law would have allowed companies to obtain a single consent to automatically share all movies viewed on Facebook and other social networks forever. The bill stalled in the Senate after a feisty hearing before Senator Franken, though some modernization of our video privacy law is inevitable.

Keywords

Privacy, Social Reading, Digital Rights, Data Collection, Surveillance, Online Privacy, Consumer Protection, Internet Law, Technology Ethics, Public Libraries

Publication Citation

Deborah Caldwell-Stone & Neil M. Richards, Choose Privacy Week 2012: The Perils of Social Reading, Intellectual Freedom Blog (May 2, 2012), https://www.oif.ala.org/choose-privacy-week-2012-the-perils-of-social-reading/

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