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Recommendations for Practical Reform of EULA Informed Consent

Having analysed the current approaches to dealing with informed consent issues in information technology, it is plain to see there are several different ways of firstly appealing to the industry, and secondly making these consent issues meaningful for both users and manufacturers, improving the overall level of consent. TRUSTe and Creative Commons are (currently) both non-profit organisations, yet one attracts a particular market (software requiring certification in order to gain a certain amount of respectability), whereas the other has a much wider base, with a highly respected group of industry links that use their system, and a large amount of respectability attached to it. The difference between them is as I explained before: one requires end-user trust in the label and protection of that label, whereas the other requires trust in the system: trust in the openness, transparency, and ease-of-use of the system in order to gain a legally-backed and protected label. It is obvious also that a resounding suggestion for improvement of ease-of-use for users of such systems is using icons to allow for easier identification of important information, as we see with both Garfinkel and the Creative Commons approach. Also important are ways for industry to incorporate the system into their own systems, such as StopBadware and Google's approach to improving consumer awareness of potentially dangerous Websites. And it is obvious that there needs to be a more basic approach than the EULAlyzer, which works to reform the system rather than simply deal with it as it is.

In this way I propose an End User License Agreement system by which a genuinely independent third party non-profit organisation establishes a set of standard agreements, in a similar way to the standard licenses from Creative Commons, coupled with an iconic labelling system that identifies key aspects of the agreements that users would consider important, in a way that allows users to waive normative expectations in order to give proper informed consent.

In establishing this system, I will outline some basic normative expectations that I would expect to be the main focus of such a system, and reiterate the process by which to identify the expectations, discuss the merits and potential issues with a set of standard agreements, along with a process for adding additional clauses to a standard agreement under this system, and then discuss the method by which such licenses would be distributed, through a Creative Commons-like non-profit trusted mediation service.



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next up previous contents
Next: Choosing Normative Expectations Up: Application of Informed Consent Previous: Creative Commons   Contents
Catherine Flick 2010-02-03