Yesterday’s Times has a short report on the Unfair Commercial Practices (PDF) directive - and in particular, the provision prohibiting posing as a consumer (a particularly obnoxious strain of astroturfing). As the Times reports, this may have a significant impact on bloggers, review sites, and so on. Who hasn’t suspected that the odd blog comment or TripAdvisor review is a little too over the top? Well, if it’s done in the course of commerce (don’t worry, posting anonymous comments on Indymedia or politics.ie about how great/evil X political party is isn’t affected!), it’s about to be a fairly significant legal matter…

It’s an interesting story, and one of special relevance in Ireland, as the Consumer Protection Bill has just been published. The Bill transposes the directive (and does lots of other fun stuff too). It’s not expressed in technological terms at all - though of course there are particular issues with detection and enforcement when such law is applied to ‘anonymous’ commenting systems. The National Consumer Agency will have great fun in dealing with complaints relating to this problem.

So indeed, the same provision referenced by the Times is in the Bill here - chapter 4 (”prohibited commercial practices”), section 52(x):

S. 52
A trader shall not engage in any of the following commercial practices:
…

(x) making a representation or creating an impression that the trader (i) is not acting for purposes related to the trader’s trade, business or profession, when the trader is so acting, or (ii) is acting as a consumer, when the trader is not;

This is taken directly from Annex I of the Directive. Section 52 prohibitions are serious: as the explanatory memorandum puts it, the section “lists specific commercial practices that are prohibited regardless of their effect on the transactional decisions of the average consumer” (in contrast with other sections, which have more limited application to practices that would mislead the average consumer into making a decision they otherwise wouldn’t). It’s a serious criminal offence, and as well as the usual penalties, courts can “order the person to publish, at the person’s expense and in any manner the court considers appropriate, the facts relating to the commission of the offence and a corrective statement in respect of those facts.” Which, in the context of online fake consumers, will be interesting to see.

Finally, a personal comment. I do have an attachment to the anything-goes, free-wheeling, gloves-off culture that characterised the earlier part of my engagement with the Web. And I have an instinctive hostility to speech regulation. However, as online business and online discussion of business becomes more and more ‘normal’, that idealism can’t stand untouched.

Corporate shills have never subscribed to those sorts of Internet ideals - you could argue that any of the negative consequences of this sort of speech regulation are entirely their fault. As long as this provision is confined to traders misrepresenting their status - or in normal language, “telling lies to make money” - it is simply a corrective device and can potentially enhance the freedom and fun that still runs through a lot of comment- and participation-based Web applications. Of course, this provision can apply to offline lies too - but something tells me that the problem is a lot more prevalent in the virtual space than in the olde worlde.

I’ve been interested in this conversation over at Blogorrah. Not content with finding endless (and legitimate) humour in the staged publicity photos beloved of Irish PR agencies, they’ve started a “Bebo Of The Day” feature. The site is fairly popular these days, what with some glowing Irish Times coverage, and has recently started to take (large) advertisements.

Anyway, a couple of the selected Bebonauts* (they are loike, TOTAL ledges) are biting back. Humour comes from the wannabe journalists who respond with barely literate rambles. But more serious questions come from the third parties who wonder whether Blogorrah is taking advantage of (mostly) naive young people (mostly female, it seems) in a way that, while a source of humour to the Blogorrah readers, is abusive and meaning towards the profile authors.

While I can agree that some of the comments (by Blogorrah readers, not necessarily by the team of authors) are quite rude, playing as they do on stereotypes and on (private) information relating to random strangers they don’t konw, we do have to look deeper. There are, as I see it, (at least) four levels of engagement with social networking/profile-based sites:

1. Do not engage, do not create a profile, etc

2. Create a profile but make it ‘private’ (for most services, this will mean only direct ‘friends’ have access, you won’t show up on portal pages, your page isn’t indexed in Google … generally speaking, your profile is restricted)
3. Create a public profile, but limit your information (i.e. basic contact details, few photographs, interests stated but not a personal diary, etc)
4. Create a public profile, and hold nothing (or very little) back.

Those that end up as the butt of jokes (or more seriously, as the targets of more sinister abuse, stalking or whatever) are quite likely to be in category 4. While things like ‘cyber-bullying’ are commonplace from category 2 onwards, and ‘bad people’ can always abuse trust for the purpose of doing ill, sympathy for those who voluntarily disclose and publish personal information should be limited. Assuming there’s no deception about the nature of access to a site, we must assume that the author of a profile is aware of the circulation of their photographs and ideas. They are of course protected (normally) by copyright law, libel law and other legal devices and opportunities. But this isn’t really a legal matter, is it? The criticism of Blogorrah is one of a moral judgement, I think. And given a presumption in favour of freedom of expression, I think they may be justified, despite the occasional unpleasantness.

New York magazine has a brilliant (but lengthy) article on the social implications of open profiles and social networking more generally. It also touches on the question of ‘push’ profiles (like the infamous Facebook News Feed and mini-feed, which I’ve criticised in the past; read danah boyd’s incisive article here for an overview and critique) and the use of profile-related information in employment and other important aspects of the Myspace-teen’s future. Worth a read.

* I assumed that this word had entered the vocabulary, but Google gives me nothing. So I may have made it up. Then again, one of my brothers suggested that when I deleted my short-lived Bebo profile, I had ‘committed bebocide’, which is similarly absent from the Google database, but an excellent word nonetheless.

This is cool. Using the BarCamp idea to discuss public transit in Toronto. The Toronto Star summarises some of the more interesting ideas discussed at the event.

BarCamp Dublin is go! April 21st is the day. And with my impeccable sense of timing, I’ll be in Birmingham then. Eoin wants your ideas on the question of blogs-law-blogs-law-blogs. Good luck to all, and don’t forget Galway, now in September.

By happy coincidence, today’s papers bring news of trouble at the University of Phoenix (the largest private university in the US, with some good work done in the lifelong learning arena, but having some less honourable moments under the heading of quality assurance!), little to show for new fees in the UK, seeming student acceptance of those new fees (to which the universities have responded “let’s double them then”) and promises of matching funding for UK philantrophy.