noise of your environment or the need to find more information to be able to give the customer the right answer (or to forward them to the person who has it).
Chapter 2
The Legal Ins and Outs of Etiquette
IN THIS CHAPTER
The wild west days of communicating online are coming to an end, and more laws are setting boundaries on what you can and can’t do (on pain of imprisonment). Despite the laws on the books and more laws being considered as we write this book, there are still other unwritten rules of online communication — just as they are in real life — that you need to know about.
In this chapter, we talk about federal laws governing online behavior in the United States as a whole as well as state laws (including laws in our home state of California), but we promise to keep the legal jargon to a minimum.
Next, we tell you about the policies your company needs to follow to make sure you don’t run afoul of any regulations. We wrap up this chapter by telling you how to respect boundaries in your communication with members of your company team and your customers.
Laying Down the (Communication) Law
In the United States, federal laws govern everyone in the country as well as state laws that augment what the feds already have in place. (If you’re not in the United States, we can’t go over summarize all the laws in every country for you, because you’d have a very thick book that you’d be intimidated to pick up, let alone read.)
Instead, we take the trite 30,000-foot view of the laws so that you understand how they affect you. We also include links to websites spelling out the full laws, in case you want to get into the weeds.
Looking at federal laws
The Communications Decency Act (CDA), passed in 1996, has a section numbered 230 that protects freedom of expression on the Internet. More specifically, the section provides immunity from liability for website platforms when it comes to third-party content, such as people posting on a social media platform.
What’s more, Section 230 includes a Good Samaritan section, which protects operators of interactive computing services from civil liability if a service removes or moderates that third-party material, even if the speech is constitutionally protected.
Where did this section come from? Let’s start with one of the earliest Internet service providers (ISPs): The World, launched way back in 1989.
https://theworld.com.
As ISPs began to grow toward widespread use in the early 1990s, a pair of lawsuits were brought against two national ISPs — CompuServe and Prodigy — by users who felt their speech was being suppressed illegally. The question at the heart of the lawsuit? Were ISPs publishers or distributors of user content?
The CDA and Section 230 were designed to answer that question, stating categorically that ISPs were mere distributors of content and therefore had no editorial control over the content being distributed. The CDA soon found itself being challenged in the courts, however, and eventually found itself in the Supreme Court. In 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the anti-indecency provisions of the CDA but left Section 230 alone. (For more on the story, check out www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history.)
The end result is that Section 230 is widely hailed as the legislation that enabled the Internet and the web to grow into the indispensable communication medium we have today. And, despite recent court challenges to Section 230 (especially around technology companies’ control over political discussions), several court decisions have found that the section is constitutional.
If you want to look into the various court cases in detail, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University has both the US Code and notes on its website (www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230#; see Figure 2.1).
FIGURE 2-1: Title 47, Section 230 of the US Code on the Legal Information Institute website.
Parsing the state laws
As of this writing, five states — California, Colorado, Nevada, Vermont, and Virginia — have enacted their own data privacy laws. These laws have similar language in several areas, including
The right to access and delete personal information
The right to opt out of the sale of personal information
Requirements that commercial websites or online services post a privacy policy (which we talk about later in this chapter)
www.uniformlaws.org/home), a nonprofit organization, founded way back in 1892, to help states produce nonpartisan, uniform laws so that if you move from, say, Virginia to Vermont, you’re not gobsmacked by completely different laws.
We don’t want to smack your head, goblike or otherwise, so we tell you what you need to know about your rights as a consumer in these five states, starting with our home state of California.
California
