NymRights

Stub for documentation on NymRights policy and research study.

Nym-friendly identity services are one of the core summer projects of the eCitizen Research initiative of the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab. This summer project aims to research and test business, legal and technical dimensions of a postulated multi persona and nym rights supportive identity service provider company. The postulated company is known as omnividual.com

A google business apps service has been provisioned to enable accounts for use by participants in the research. Use of an OpenID Connect service is also being contemplated as well as use of industry leading identity as a service federation providers.

Some additional questions:

• How can we set up the system so people can agree to and/or see the names policy?
• How do we enable new accounts? Maybe we could set up a web facing page on omnividual.com where people can sign up?
• What happens if someone does get suspended? Do we need to make them agree to fight any issues Google brings up? Also, do we need to explicitly get their permission for emails/etc regarding a suspension appeal made public?
• Do we want to set explicit timelines for how long we'll let Google wait before we pursue a second attempt at appeal? Maybe we could appeal internally, and then in a week if we've heard nothing, make it public?
• I assume we'll be changing the nym policy over time. Aside from letting someone agree to the most recent commit, how can we manage users agreeing to an older version? Maybe we could just release updates to the policy on a semi-monthly basis, and allow users to leave the service if they want to?
• Could get reach out to a sponsor to fund X Google accounts for a year? What happens if someone has an account and wants to use it beyond the year? Or could we "hire" them for a "contract" period and allow them to "renew" their "contract" when the time runs out? Or are we going to view them as customers? I'm not entirely clear on the Google Apps relationship of business to user accounts.
• Do we need to make it clear that because both MIT and Google are in the US, people are held to US laws? What happens if someone uses our service and breaks the law in another country?

(these questions are Google centric, but I think it could follow for any company that does name based suspensions).