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Me2B

The Me2B Respectful Tech Specification is a sorely needed ethical and safety standard for the internet. It consists of a series of tests that objectively measure the behavior of a connected product or service. The Specification helps people (“Me-s”) understand how technology is treating them, and helps businesses (“B-s”) build technology that is safe and respectful for the people that use it.

The Internet Society Foundation recently granted the Me2B Alliance $100,000 to complete its “U.S. EdTech Industry Benchmark: Data Sharing in Primary & Secondary School Mobile Utility Apps.” The benchmark will build on previous findings about harmful data sharing practices by uncovering how sensitive student information is being treated by school utility apps in grades pre-k through 12 in schools across the nation.

This is a story of a politician who cried “hacker” after a reporter informed a state agency that sensitive information was embedded in their websites HTML source code1. While we wish this was a joke or fictional story it, unfortunately, is not. If the state of Missouri does move forward with the prosecution this state action would sound the alarm for researchers and reporters resulting in a chilling effect on the practice of responsible reporting.

When we started drafting the Respectful Tech Specification a couple of years ago, it was immediately obvious that we didnt have an adequate vocabulary to describe personal experiences in the digital world—never mind measure them.

The Me2B Deals or transactions that occur online typically involve three types of “currency”: money, attention or data. [...] What sets online data monetization apart from the other two currencies is that often, customers have no idea what they are paying with or that they are paying at all.

our relationship with connected technology includes a set of “hidden affiliates” (third party integrations) that most of us are not aware of. This guide describes how these relationships conscious or not emerge as we interact with digital technologies.

This real life social context is currently missing in both existing privacy regulation and in industry standards models for ethical technology [...] Our model helps course-correct connected technology by pinpointing how the digital Me2B experience deviates from important social behavioral norms.

This guide provides examples of common Commitments and Deals, and shows how they map to the stages of a Me2B Lifecycle. It also reflects social norms for being anonymous, recognized, or known at each stage.

The Me2B Respectful Tech Specification measures technology behavior against 10 attributes that respectful Me2B Commitments should possess. These attributes represent how technology should treat us and our data at every step along the Me2B Relationship Lifecycle.

Our personal data flows do not start light and increase with time and trust. Instead, a firehose of personal information is released and shared with a host of unseen third parties as soon as we open an app or website. Me2BAs Respectful Tech Specification V.1 is largely focused on testing for these invisible parallel dataverse data flows.

Twenty-five quintillion bytes of data are generated every day. Thats 25,000,000,000,000,000,000. In this era of data abundance, its easy to think of these bytes as a panacea informing policies and spurring activities to address the pandemic, climate change or gender inequality but without the right systems in place, we cannot realize the full potential of data to advance a sustainable, equit

TLDR: The Me2B Alliance believes apps including the AskingPoint SDK should be safe from malicious redirects or other exploits.