The system should be designed with a number of additional measures to provide robustness that support well a general approach of vigilance and heedfulness.
(1) Protecting against Malevolent People
- Close attention should be given (as stated elsewhere) to the status box (and other message areas) – both guidance on entering content and system-checks on submissions. Prevention messages should target inappropriate patterns of behaviour.
- Sigala should sign up to a code of practice setting out how it will deal with threats and abuse, including clear guidelines on the reporting process.
- Sigala will help protect children by identifying the parent (or guardian) – child relationship type as a dependency and in such a relationship act as a gatekeeper or moderator. One function of such a role can be right at the beginning when the guardian registers a minor so as to ensure the right data and permissions are entered. In their ongoing role as guardian they can be kept informed in various ways of how their child is using the network – for example, if a young child wishes to make a connection to someone who is not connected with their guardian or a relative, then the guardian receives notification and might be expected to give permission.
- The system can make further background checks on the registration of a person to try to validate the details that they have entered, perhaps through checks with authoritative sources of information such as census data, and also carry out an analysis of their network. If there are question marks as a result of such analysis, then warnings may be issued with varying levels of severity, as with anti-virus software. This level of control should probably depend on the localisation to reflect variation among cultures.
(2) Protecting Property
- By design, sharing in Sigala is mainly with particular relationship types, reducing the chance of strangers accessing sensitive details.
(3) Inappropriate content: Protection, Monitoring, Enforcement and Cleaning up
- Some protection will be by design through constraints in the network design – as provided by the separation of concerns – with guidance, as discussed elsewhere.
- enforcement: the social network should find within itself the means to police itself and this process should be open – people can be recommended through their personal networks and we may have, for example, relatives and/or friends who we know are in such roles.
- moderation (regulating content in SNS and online communities): this will again be developed internally through network design, especially the protective relationships of parent-child and teacher-student, with additional measures where these fail. It should and aim to be sustainable. Details to be determined …
(4) Safety Engineering Approaches for Human Protection
In the context of SNS, safety means in particular protection of one’s regard –one’s profile and reputation. It is therefore important to realize a system that is robust with respect to social protection.
- Sigala development will put in place a safety lifecycle whereby potential dangers (technically called hazards) may be identified, risks assessed and handled accordingly. Safety issues are to be treated as intrinsic and handled systematically.
- Further, the software should be analysed for faults, how it can fail – traditionally handled in safety engineering by disciples such as fault tree analysis (FTA) and failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA). Such methods have traditionally been oriented to physical factors, so with appropriate modification they should become suitable for SNS, whence following these approaches should at least improve the safety for all users.
- To help protect especially one’s reputation, Sigala offers protection in two dimensions – horizontal, in terms of the separation of concerns into different types of relationships; and vertical in terms of depth of relationships. It means that sharing with specific kinds of connections of at least a certain depth will help limit indiscriminate propagation.
(5) At the intersection of people’s preferences
Issues commonly arise in tagging and sharing photos. One person may like to tag a photo from a social gathering, but not all the people tagged may want the photo to be widely shared.
The principle operating here can be “not taking that which is not given”. An individual can specify their sharing options in terms of each direction, e.g.“family photos in which I share only with family” should only be shared among family members. If a family member wants to share this photo more widely then they will be prompted to seek permission from the content creator.
With regards to tagging there should be due attention to privacy.
In conclusion, personal safety is an area that requires ongoing proactive research to anticipate and prevent potential hazards.
We now conclude our discussions on system requirements with hosting…