[governance] Re: IGC on Facebook?

[Norbert Bollow]

David Allen <David_Allen_AB63 at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Happily, the Arab spring had some new tools, however flawed, that  
> helped put it / them over the top.

Yes.

Obviously the Arab spring activists didn't worry much about what
a "social networking" / marketing company would do with their data.

Whether such lack of concern is justified is a different question.

There's a lot of scenarios where such lack of concern could turn
out to be very harmful. For example, I'd be very surprised if the
secret services of all remaining oppressive governments aren't
working very hard on gaining access e.g. to the internal network
of Facebook, and on developing strategies for exploiting whatever
architectural or other flaws of Facebook they may be able to discover.

> Equally happily, we can do better than flawed tools.  And as a policy  
> group, re global 'Net policy, hopefully we will, by advocating /  
> innovating tools that are even more common - and of quality.  Instead  
> of selling ourselves to marketeers ...

Strongly agreed. We may not succeed in avoiding every flaw, but
at least we can work towards creating communication tools etc
that avoid the worst flaws, and we can avoid "selling ourselves
to marketeers" in the sense of effectively requiring people to
join Facebook (or any other service with similar privacy concerns
and/or lock-in effects) in order to fully participate in IGC internal
"who meets whom when and where while in Nairobi" coordination.

Greetings,
Norbert
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