EFF Releases Updated White Paper on Best Practices for Online Service Providers

Today EFF released a revised white paper on Best Practices for Online Service Providers, an update of the 2004 OSP Best Practices white paper. In the white paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for the best privacy practices for collecting, storing and disclosing data that balance the needs of OSPs and their users' privacy and civil liberties.

OSPs are vital links between their users and the Internet, offering bandwidth, email, web, and other Internet services. In the process of offering services, OSPs collect and store detailed information about their users and their user's online activities.

User information can be of great interest to the government and civil litigants, leading to numerous requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP's goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services.

In the OSP Best Practices white paper, we offer information for OSPs in order to help them make sound, ethical decisions about how to safeguard private data and preserve freedom of expression online.

Summary of Recommendations

OSPs can face many other legal issues beyond user privacy, from DMCA takedown requests to defamation claims to issues with adult materials. While these are outside the scope of the OSP Best Practices paper, EFF recommends that OSPs review the EFF Bootcamp materials, which provides the basics on a number of key legal issues for Web 2.0 companies. We also recommend reading EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers, which provides a basic roadmap to the legal issues one may confront as an online publisher.

Related Issues: Privacy, Search Engines

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