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blogs at college

June 25, 2003 5:11 AM - comments (7)

Dave and the Berkman Center folks have been building a "user agreement for weblog hosting at Harvard Law, and a privacy policy. We hope it could become a template for other universities, schools, libraries, perhaps even businesses." Comments and help invited.

Posted on June 25, 2003 5:11 AM | | technorati

Comments (7)

June 25, 2003 3:58 PM Dan:

Not to be a heckler, but what significance do you see here? That they are offering blogging as opposed to just webhosting (which at least most universities offer) or that they have a "default" content license in the event that the creators don't license their own works differently? The former seems like a nice evolution in terms of services provided; most students would probably like to be able to do dynamic websites but the permissions offered on most multi-user Unix boxes don't permit much; the latter seems like a decent idea but nothing revolutionary, considering that the student can always re-license it as he wishes. Am I missing something?

June 27, 2003 2:21 PM James Day:

It's potentially interesting, were it not for the privacy policy.

That appears to permit mass privacy infringement through things like providing warrantless data on all air travellers in the US to support CAPPS2. At least some statement intent to prevent such mass privacy violation would be nice. At least for non-public entries, it would be nice to see some commitment to trying to keep them that way, instead of a commitment to disclose them on request for what is presumably any, however non-specific, claimed law enforcement purpose.

Disclosure if IP addresses is also problematic. Disclosure of the results of encrypting them with a secret key to identify identical posters wouldn't be, nor would disclosure of raw IPs with no linking to a specific blog.

I read the privacy policy and thought "no way am I going to use this".

June 28, 2003 1:12 AM jocbrut:

ok thanks for the info

March 26, 2004 10:46 AM kyle:

just testing this thing

March 26, 2004 10:50 AM just:

testing

March 26, 2004 10:53 AM just:

testing

April 16, 2008 10:40 AM wow power leveling:

That appears to permit mass privacy infringement through things like providing warrantless data on all air travellers in the US to support CAPPS2. At least some statement intent to prevent such mass privacy violation would be nice. At least for non-public entries, it would be nice to see some commitment to trying to keep them that way, instead of a commitment to disclose them on request for what is presumably any, however non-specific, claimed law enforcement purpose.

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