By Nico van Eijk, Professor of Information Law at the Institute for Information Law

This post is part of a series on data portability and interoperability. 

Data portability will help users move to other service providers with more ease. It will promote the consumers’ interest when they want to switch from one digital platform to another. And it will contribute to more competition between companies. These, at least, were the most important arguments for the creation of a consumers’ right to take their data with them, now a key element of the new European privacy law, GDPR, that recently took effect.

Who could object to such noble goals? This is exactly the right question, only much of the current debate glides past it. Too often data portability is viewed as a binary interaction involving the consumer who wants to move their data elsewhere and the service provider that currently holds the consumer’s data. In the ideal world of data portability, these two parties reach agreement about moving the consumer’s data and everybody moves on.

But the simplicity of this transaction breaks down when you start asking yourself exactly what data you’re referring to. The posts and videos showing your music preferences? Information about your behavior on the internet, like your search results? Or products you bought?

There is also the elemental fact that a lot of ‘your’ data is actually someone else’s too – all of your friends. The internet and the digital platforms you use are of such great value because they allow you to interact with so many others. You share photos of you and your friends. You exchange comments on news articles posted on social media. And you keep all your friends in your contacts. Considering that factor, should they have a say when you move ‘your’ data to another service provider? Should you have to ask for their consent?

Under Europe’s new laws your friends’ interests are completely irrelevant. There might be good, practical reasons that led to this. You can’t ask everyone who you’ve been in touch with for permission when you transfer your data, and even after you do the social platform that receives the data must comply with the European data protection rules. But is this what your friends expected when they engaged in an information exchange with you? Or did they engage because they found comfort in the fact that you were using a service provider they too chose to trust? The fact that the formal data protection rules apply to all providers is important and highly relevant. But how does your friend know whether the new provider is fully aware of the terms of agreement that you and your friends had under your previous service provider?

Data portability raises important questions about users’ reasonable expectations and trust in their friends and providers. And it goes beyond ensuring that providers are compliant with data protection legislation. If you consent for a friend to use your data on an alternate service, what happens if that service misuses the data? What happens if that friend misuses it? In other words, consent may not be sufficient to ensure that people’s data is used only in the way they intended.

Users moving data to less trustworthy providers might have a serious effect on the entire ecosystem. This is no theoretical matter. It relates to questions we’re all quite familiar with in everyday life. We prefer certain suppliers above others because they provide higher security levels and exceed the minimum legal requirements on consumer and data protection We prefer financially solid service providers above those that are underfunded. We don’t want our information to be exploited by advertising models that are – morally – beyond our standards.

Data portability is not between two parties. It’s about managing a complex traffic hub with conflicting interests. It requires users and providers to look at the intertwined interests of many in ways that go beyond simple compliance.

There is a broader spectrum of responsibility that should be considered. As a user it should include taking care of our friends. As a provider it should mean taking care of users – both past and present. In law, as with philosophy, we often define these kind of principles as so-called ‘duties of care’.

Fulfilling these responsibilities can take many forms. Users could inform their friends of their intention to move to another provider and offer them options: partially or entirely opt out, or give their consent. Providers could facilitate users by consulting with their friends about their options. Or the provider who will be porting the data could inform the receiving provider about applicable limitations beyond the minimum legal limitations set by data protection laws or other legal requirements.

Steps such as these are fundamental to a trustworthy environment and deserve more attention than they thus far have been given. They also underscore that data portability is a means and not a goal in itself.

Nico van Eijk is professor of Information Law at the Institute for Information Law (IViR, University of Amsterdam).

We believe in giving people a voice, but we also want everyone using Facebook to feel safe. It’s why we have Community Standards and remove anything that violates them, including hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others. Earlier today, we removed four Pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly posting content over the past several days that breaks those Community Standards. Here’s more detail on enforcement of our standards:

How do you deal with people and Pages who repeatedly violate your standards?
Simply removing content that violates our standards is not enough to deter repeat offenders. It’s why every time we remove something, it counts as a strike against the person who posted it. And when it comes to Pages, we hold both the entire Page and the person who posted the content accountable. Here’s a step-by-step overview of what happens when content is reported to Facebook:

If a Page posts content that violates our Community Standards, the Page and the Page admin responsible for posting the content receive a strike. When a Page surpasses a certain threshold of strikes, the whole Page is unpublished. For people, including Page admins, the effects of a strike vary depending on the severity of the violation and a person’s history on Facebook. For example, some content is so bad that posting it just once means we would remove the account immediately. In the case of other violations, we may warn someone the first time they break our Community Standards. If they continue, we may temporarily block their account, which restricts their ability to post on Facebook, or remove it all together.

What is the number of strikes a person or Page has to get to before you ban them?
We don’t want people to game the system, so we do not share the specific number of strikes that leads to a temporary block or permanent suspension.

When we remove content for violating our policies, we notify the person who posted it to explain why, with some narrow exceptions to account for things like child exploitation imagery.

If someone violates our policies multiple times, their account will be temporarily blocked; a Page that does so will be unpublished. When a person is in a temporary block, they can read things on Facebook, but they can’t like, comment or post. If that person is also the admin of a Facebook Page, the block prevents them from posting to the Page.

If a Page is unpublished, is that different from removing them and if so why?
We offer Pages the opportunity to appeal in case we made a mistake. So our first step is to “unpublish” the Page so that it is no longer available on Facebook. If they don’t appeal or their appeal fails, we remove the Page.

This is very complicated — why do it this way?
This approach ensures Pages (even those with multiple admins), as well as Page admins, are held accountable for the content they post. It also means that admins cannot use multiple Pages to violate our policies and avoid strikes against their personal profiles. It’s not perfect — but we believe it’s a practical way to deter repeat offenders and help keep people safe.

How do you distinguish between fake news and content that breaks your Community Standards?
People can say things on Facebook that are wrong or untrue, but we work to limit the distribution of inaccurate information. We partner with third-party fact checkers to review and rate the accuracy of articles on Facebook. When something is rated as false, those stories are ranked significantly lower in News Feed, cutting future views by more than 80%.

When it comes to our Community Standards, they’re focused on keeping people safe. If you post something that goes against our standards, which cover things like hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others, we will remove it from Facebook.

So what happened with InfoWars? They were up on Friday and now they are down?
As a result of reports we received, last week, we removed four videos on four Facebook Pages for violating our hate speech and bullying policies. These pages were the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the InfoWars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page. In addition, one of the admins of these Pages – Alex Jones – was placed in a 30-day block for his role in posting violating content to these Pages.

Since then, more content from the same Pages has been reported to us — upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.

All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes. While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news, which is a serious issue that we are working to address by demoting links marked wrong by fact checkers and suggesting additional content, none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.

By Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety, and Karuna Nain, Global Safety Programs Manager

Today we’re launching our Digital Literacy Library, a collection of lessons to help young people think critically and share thoughtfully online. There are 830 million young people online around the world, and this library is a resource for educators looking to address digital literacy and help these young people build the skills they need to safely enjoy digital technology.

The ready-to-use lessons in the Library are drawn from the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which has made them freely available worldwide under a Creative Commons license.

Developed for educators of youth ages 11 to 18, the lessons incorporate learnings from over 10 years of academic research by the Youth and Media team, and they reflect the voices of young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, geographies, and educational levels. The lessons address thematic areas such as privacy and reputation, identity exploration, security, safety and wellbeing, and more.

We know that educators already manage busy classrooms and learning environments. The lessons were designed to make it as easy as possible to integrate them into formal and informal learning environments — letting educators know how much time each lesson will take and providing written prompts to follow along the way. These lessons work well together or on their own, in after-school programs or at home, and can be modified to incorporate educators’ own experiences and ideas.

The 18 lessons, currently in English and coming soon in 45 additional languages, are free to download and can be found on Facebook’s Safety Center and Berkman Klein’s Digital Literacy Resource Platform. We’re working with non-profit organizations around the world to adapt these lessons and create additional new ones for educators globally.

The Digital Literacy Library is the latest addition to the Safety Center. Earlier this year we added our Youth Portal, which includes tips for young people on things like security and reporting content, as well as advice and first-person accounts from teens around the world about how they are using technology.

For further context and information, please visit Youth and Media’s FAQ; additional lessons developed by Youth and Media are available on Berkman Klein’s Digital Literacy Resource Platform.

By Terrell McSweeny, Former Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission

This post is part of a series on data portability and interoperability. 

Data has been likened to the blood, oil, water – even the gold – of our Internet economy. Its value has increased alongside the migration of our lives to digital. Paradoxically, we are sharing more data than ever before, even as we struggle to understand the implications of doing so. Most Americans believe they have lost control over how their personal information is collected and used. Our once blithe confidence in new technology is now complicated by questions about how to protect privacy, autonomy, and healthy competition in the age of connected everything. Against this backdrop, it’s tempting to presume that privacy can only be protected by severely restricting the flow of data – by closing off one provider’s data from another’s. Such an approach, however, could limit the ability of users to easily move their data around and reduce the potential for innovative new entrants to markets and all the benefits that may flow to consumers from them. Privacy is a crucial aspect of consumer rights in the digital age – and openness is another. The right balance will be found in policies that give users meaningful control over their digital identities but that also foster competition and innovation.

Most of us are now familiar with the grand bargain of our digital economy. We enjoy the benefits of the innovative products and services available to us, often for free, in exchange for our data. We experience the pleasure and ease they bring to our lives when we download apps for work, entertainment, transportation, food — almost anything. For the most part, we don’t dwell on who has our data and how it’s being used. That is, until something unexpected occurs that frays our trust and calls into question whether consumers are bearing too much risk in the deal.

For years privacy experts have rightly warned that consumers relinquish too much information with too little understanding of how it’s used and limited recourse when it’s mishandled. Under the current US data protection framework, so long as a person is properly notified and consents to how their data will be used, nothing more is required. Now this framework is being challenged – in the US and elsewhere – and one of the central issues in the global discussion about privacy is how much control consumers should have over how their data flows. This conversation is long overdue.

Europe has set a high bar by granting broad rights to consumers over their data. The General Data Protection Regulation, commonly referred to as the GDPR, gives users rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, and move their data from one service provider to another. It is a strict approach that is moving other major markets to consider strengthening their own data privacy laws, even at the state level. California, for example, recently passed a new privacy law that requires companies to disclose the types of data they collect and allows consumers to opt out of having their personal information sold. The California law does not include all of the same rights as the GDPR, but, importantly, it does include a right for users to access and move their data from one service provider to another.

Models that vest more control in users are essential consumer protections. To be useful, they should include meaningful data portability. Most of the large platforms already allow users to download data such as email archives, photos, posts, and messages. But one of the challenges is whether consumers can easily use that information once they’ve accessed it. For example, if you receive a print-out of an archive you cannot reasonably move — or port – from one service to another, what real good does that do? On the other hand, users that receive data in a machine-readable format can transfer it to other services more easily – particularly if open standards are used for moving data around. Interoperability, the degree to which data once accessed is usable, is, therefore, an essential aspect of giving consumers functional control over their information. Recent steps by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and other organizations participating in the Data Transfer Project to find a common way for people to transfer data into and out of services are promising steps toward facilitating a more useful data ecosystem for consumers’ data.

But even when consumers do have greater control, challenging privacy questions remain that can affect, even stymie, those rights. For example, users may grant permission for an app to access their contact list so that they can use some useful feature like a chat service. Yet granting that access implicates the privacy interests of the people in that user’s digital address book. An even trickier issue arises in sorting through the privacy and security interests involved in allowing users to move data generated by their activity on a platform – like their social graph data – which is an individual’s network of friends and their interactions with them. Some have called for policies to “free the social graph” to make it easier for people to move between social networking services without having to completely rebuild their networks manually. But if you want to move to a new social network and take personally identifiable information about your friends with you, should you have to ask your friends for consent first? What happens if one of your friends doesn’t want you to be able to move that data? Answering these questions requires a careful balancing of privacy with user control. A solution might be to build a way to allow users to easily ask friends to join a new service with them.

Protecting consumer rights is essential but it isn’t the only factor at play. When users can seamlessly transfer their data between service providers it might allow for start-ups or other competitive services to enter a market more easily. That fosters competition and innovation. If on the other hand people are deeply tethered to platforms through data that is difficult, costly, or even impossible to move, entry for competitive services may be too challenging, limiting the creation of data on new platforms.

Facilitating innovation will require data policies that go beyond strong user centered controls and privacy protections. This is particularly true for foundational platforms that serve as intermediaries between most people and the Internet. For example, the mobile app marketplace, which didn’t even exist a decade ago, is projected to generate around $189 billion in revenue in 2020. There are now millions of apps available through Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and other app stores. Consumers rely on feeding data through them to access new products and services. Businesses rely on accessing that data in order to grow.

Positive developments for consumer privacy do not need to come at the expense of innovation. But getting the balance right will require appropriate guardrails to protect people’s privacy and security and ensure their data is handled consistent with their expectations. Computers may process in bits of data but the choice between privacy and openness isn’t binary. Both are required to protect consumers rights and attain the innovative potential of the digital age.

Terrell McSweeny is a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.

By Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer

By 2024, more than 1 million computing and digital jobs will be open in the US. Filling these jobs is critical to our economy and our communities – and we want to help more people learn the skills they need to thrive in the digital world.

That’s why we’re committed to training 1 million people and small business owners in digital skills across the US by 2020. To meet this goal, we’re creating more in-person training programs, offering online classes, and partnering with local and national organizations who will help teach digital skills in their communities.

Today our Facebook Community Boost program is in Columbus, Ohio where we’re announcing two new partnerships — one locally with the Columbus State Community College and another with the National Urban League.

Supporting Small Business and Communities in Columbus, Ohio

We’re thrilled to bring our free Community Boost training program to one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. Columbus is known as the “biggest small town in America” because of its friendly and entrepreneurial spirit. Small businesses make up 99.9% of Ohio business and many of them make their home in Columbus and Franklin County. This area is also home to Facebook’s data center in New Albany, which supports hundreds of jobs in the region.

Over the next few days we’ll be at the Columbus Athenaeum hosting training sessions, interactive workshops and speakers, all focused on helping local businesses and non-profits boost their digital skills. All of the courses are free and available to everyone in the community no matter what your skill level. You’ll also get to hear from inspiring local entrepreneurs who will share what they learned about starting a new business.

Our commitment to Columbus goes well beyond this week’s events. Through our partnership with Columbus State Community College (CSCC) we’re developing a new Digital Marketing Program so students can take digital marketing and social media classes that will help prepare them for jobs. We’ll work closely with the CSCC to structure classes so they reflect what we learned directly from Columbus jobseekers, managers and local small businesses:

Columbus small businesses told us they believe social media is central to success, with nearly three in four (72%) saying that creating a social media presence for their company is important for growth. Yet less than one in five (19%) saying their skills in this area are excellent. We also learned that small businesses value digital skills when hiring employees, with more than 8 in 10 (85%) small business managers telling us a person’s digital skills are important — nearly twice as many as those that value where a candidate went to school (44%). Nearly 7 in 10 (69%) of small business managers also said that creating targeted advertising online is important for business growth, but less than one in five (19%) said that their skills in this area are excellent.

Partnering with the National Urban League to Train Small Businesses Across the US

Another way we’re helping people learn digital skills is through partnerships like the one we’re announcing today with the National Urban League.

Our expanded collaboration with the National Urban League builds upon our existing work with Urban League affiliates in St Louis and Houston and will help us reach the underserved communities who need it most.

Starting in 2019, we’ll offer trainings in social media strategy and digital marketing at 13 National Urban League locations in the following cities: Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Kansas City, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Washington, D.C.

“The National Urban League will also join us as a national advisor, helping us create new opportunities for small businesses from underserved communities.
This partnership with Facebook perfectly encapsulates the focus of our mission on the intersection between digital technology and economic opportunity,” National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial said. “The theme of our conference is ‘Save our Cities: Powering the Digital Revolution,’ and empowering our entrepreneurs through the use of digital tools is a great example of how to make that happen.”

We’re grateful to partner with such an effective civil rights organization helping to change lives for the better.