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Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0 227
metadata about an item’s origin would actually be the item itself. It is data as
service, and insofar as it leaves too much control with the data’s originator, it
suffers from many of the drawbacks of software as service described in Chapter
Five. For the purposes of privacy, we do not need such a radical reworking of
the copy-and-paste culture of the Web. Rather, we need ways for people to signal
whether they would like to remain associated with the data they place on
the Web, and to be consulted about unusual uses.
This weaker signaling-based version of Nelson’s vision does not answer the
legal question of what would happen if the originator of the data could not
come to an agreement with someone who wanted to use it. But as with robots
.txt and Creative Commons licenses, it could forestall many of the conflicts
that will arise in the absence of any standard at all. 125 Most importantly, it
would help signal authorial intention not only to end users but also to the intermediaries
whose indices provide the engines for invasions of privacy in the
first place. One could indicate that photos were okay to index by tag but not by
facial recognition, for example. If search engines of today are any indication,
such restrictions could be respected even without a definitive answer as to the
extent of their legal enforceability. Indeed, by attaching online identity—if not
physical identity—to the various bits of data that are constantly mashed up as
people copy and paste what they like around the Web, it becomes possible for
people to get in touch with one another more readily to express thanks, suggest
collaboration, or otherwise interact as people in communities do. Similarly,
projects like reCAPTCHA could seek to alert people to the extra good their
solving of captchas is doing—and even let them opt out of solving the second
word in the image, the one that is not testing whether they are human but instead
is being used to perform work for someone else. Just as Moore v. Regents of
the University of California struggled with the issue of whether a patient whose
tumor was removed should be consulted before the tumor is used for medical
research, 126 we will face the question of when people ought to be informed
when their online behaviors are used for ulterior purposes—including beneficial
ones.
Respect for robots.txt, Creative Commons licenses, and privacy “tags,” and
an opportunity to alert people and allow them to opt in to helpful ventures
with their routine online behavior like captcha-solving, both requires and
promotes a sense of community. Harnessing some version of Nelson’s vision is
a self-reinforcing community-building exercise—bringing people closer together
while engendering further respect for people’s privacy choices. It should
be no surprise that people tend to act less charitably in today’s online environ-