Bill of Rights

Draft 1.0 by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

Ownership of their own personal information, including
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.