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Our Data, Our Rights (Interview with Prof. Lilian Edwards)

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Digital Footprint

The University of Edinburgh

4.6 (180 ratings) | 5.3K Students Enrolled

If I Googled you, what would I find? As we move around the online world we leave tracks and traces of our activity all the time: social media accounts, tagged images, professional presences, scraps of text, but also many artefacts we don't always realise we are leaving behind, or that others leave about us. In this course you will hear from a range of experts and you will have an opportunity to explore and reflect on your own online tracks and traces, to understand why your digital footprint is important. We will introduce you to some of the tools and approaches to effectively manage your online presence (or digital footprint). The course will focus on the different dimensions of a digital footprint, including developing an effective online presence, managing your privacy, creating opportunities for networking, balancing and managing professional and personal presences (eprofessionalism). By the end of this course (MOOC) you should be equipped to ensure that your digital footprint works for you, whether you want to be more private online, or are looking to create a more effective and impactful presence. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DFMOOC and follow us @DFMOOC We hope you enjoy the course!

Skills You'll Learn

Digital Footprint, E-Professional, Social Media, Privacy

Reviews

4.6 (180 ratings)

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IK

Aug 11, 2017

This course is wonderful. It was very useful and interesting!\n\nI will definitely recommend course "Digital Footprint" to everyone :)

AM

Dec 24, 2018

Easy clear valuable course to know about how online presence is important, and how to manage it.

From the lesson

Why does your digital footprint matter?

This week, there is a range of experts who focus on why a digital footprint matters and how to create an effective online presence. The themes explored include data after death, privacy online and managing your online data. The activity and quizzes will help you to consider your own online presence and what you might do to make it more effective and work for you!

Our Data, Our Rights (Interview with Prof. Lilian Edwards)4:54

Death and Privacy (Interview with Prof. Lilian Edwards)6:29

Data after death (Interview with Prof. Lilian Edwards)5:39

Taught By

Louise Connelly
E-Learning Developer
Nicola Osborne
Digital Education Manager

Transcript

[MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining us, Lilian. Maybe you'd like to just say a little bit about what you do and your interest in digital footprints and where you're coming from. Okay, I'm a professor of actually of E-governance but really of Internet Law. And I do everything involving technology and law I supposed. I used to say that what I did was translate from law to geek, and from geek to law. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] So over the really long period, I've been doing this considering that the internet only really kicked of for families in about 96 and I have been doing it since before that. I've really covered a very wide range of topics, including copyright, data protection, privacy, cyber crime, cyber security and yeah currently I've been quite interested in this question of what happens to our digital assets, what you call digital footprint after we die. Yes, I guess the obvious question is, what are our rights over our data? And what are some of the issues that come up when you die and you've left all of this stuff out there on the web? Mm. I mean the word data is a bit misleading in some ways because the things that people have around them in the digital world after they die they often won't think of as data so, for example, your photos on Facebook or Instagram or wherever. These have a lot of emotional resonance. For people. Whereas data sounds quite abstract. Similarly, like your money, maybe your Bitcoins is a really nice example because that's a very difficult one [LAUGH] as to what happens to your Bitcoins after you die. Your domain names they're data. But again, they're often the absolute key to say running family business. For example. Of course. So where we started in our research, this was the research done by myself and my then PhD student Adina Arbinga, was we tried to make a sort of nonexclusive list of digital assets >> And that did include, you really have to kind of brainstorm on it. It did include the obvious things like Facebook profiles, and emails, and direct messages and texts. Slightly less obvious things maybe like the music you buy from iTunes. The books you buy from Amazon Kindle and other suppliers are available. And then the even wackier things like Bitcoins, which has become a source of some interest and even your musical preferences, so for example a site like Spotify or Last.fm is actually storing your musical preferences forever because it goes into their algorithm, yeah. Which I think was interesting. And Last.fm which clearly at that point had been set up by a bunch of geek hippies. Actually had, this was really a long time ago, so it's probably completely changed, cause I think they got bought by somebody. But, at some point, I did inquire what they did about this, because this strongly informed their algorithms. And they said, we regard this as really the common heritage of everyone on the system. You know your engagement with the system. So you've contributed to the common good something. Has made it what it is. Yeah, the common good of mankind kind of angle, which I thought was really fascinating. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] It's definitely interesting. So I know we've kind of Facebook pages, there's the kind of tribute pages. But how do some of the other sites deal with this kind of data? And do you have-Yeah. Hand on those rights or remove content- Rights is always a difficult word in this context. A right to to a lawyer is something that you can enforce against somebody in a court if absolutely necessary. And get some kind of remedy. And really these aren't very like that. The problem again, and this pervades Internet lore at least pervades the parts I'm interested in, is the intermediaries. Mm-hm. You're talking about a world that's run by platforms and intermediaries. And really what runs the show. Are their contracts, their terms of service. Which don't intend to give you very many rights at all because that's how you would draft it [LAUGH] if you were their lawyer. That's how I would draft it. So, for example, a lot of people famously know now for example when Instagram was bought by Facebook. They suddenly discovered that Facebook owned all their photos. In fact, that was very little change from how it been before Instagram was bought by Facebook. It's just nobody pays attention. So nearly all sites say that what they do in fact, is they take a perpetual non-exclusive license. To your intellectual property. To save your writings and your photos and your videos. [MUSIC]

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