Ages ago, I allowed for a participant 'observer' to join interactive webinars and online forums, with the agreement that no recording would be taken, for a simalr purpose (assessment of methodologies by an institution). This purpose was clearly communicated to other attendees and it was not considered particularly intrusive also because the observer took an active role (so that the behaviour was absolutely transparent).
I regret that decision because the idea was very rapidly copied by others who had similar formal authority and obvious legitimate possibility to join the classes, but very different intentions. I think I might have written about these problems (as early examples of unregulated and disruptive unfair competition within online environments not so far from other cyber criminal behaviours after all) in a paper ('The Missing Business Case: Rise and Fall of an Information Literacy Training Programme', self archived at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2186911 carefully censored from the Library Trends special issue for which it had been agreed and not even indexed by Google apparently).
Unfortunately, respect for any agreement you make within online environments where people work and communicate remotely cannot be really controlled / enforced at present.
Technologies of collaboration or e-learning platforms do not give you any guarantee so far that somebody does not exploit the medium beyond your direct or indirect surveillance, spying or simple aggressive lurking and futile video recording mania.
So the conclusion is, from a legal point of view and DP implications, that even when you are not 'neutral', because you are supervising or delivering online lessons (and that is the core of the service you have agreed to provide to customers), your actual possibilities to be really in control of the way in which the content and the interactions are used are very limited. Therefore neutrality seems to be not an option but a starting point for the regulators as well as for other actors.
I interpreted (and found accettable only because of such reasoning) in this direction the recent decision of the high court in Italy to free Google directors accused to allow sharing of videos insulting a down syndrom individual - although it was evident that they were perfectly aware of what they themselves were publishing at the time. But accusing them of intentional exploiting conduct aimed at rising click through and audience shares would constitute an unbearable precedent.
Brunella Longo
Information Management Adviser
http://www.brunellalongo.co.uk
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All archives of messages are stored permanently and are
available to the world wide web community at large at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html
If you wish to leave this list please send the command
leave data-protection to [log in to unmask]
All user commands can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm
Any queries about sending or receiving messages please send to the list owner
[log in to unmask]
Full help Desk - please email [log in to unmask] describing your needs
To receive these emails in HTML format send the command:
SET data-protection HTML to [log in to unmask]
(all commands go to [log in to unmask] not the list please)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|