DCIA to Develop Inadvertent Sharing Protection Program

After we reported that the DCIA announced the schedule and the list of the first speakers for its approaching P2P MEDIA SUMMIT Silicon Valley, here comes another important announcement from the trade organization: it revealed an industry-wide plan that would ensure protection to P2P users against the inadvertent sharing of personal or sensitive data (see yesterday’s report about major data breach caused by file sharing). Actually this is the outcome of a year of collaboration with the major private sector participants and also with US federal regulatory representatives. DCIA website offers a summary document at www.dcia.info/activities/ispg/inadvertentsharingprotection.pdf.

The announcement (made by DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty) went like this: "We are grateful for the participation of industry-leading companies in a collaborative process with regulatory agency representatives that has resulted in an excellent work product. While adoption is a voluntary decision to be made by each company on an individual basis, we are confident of wide acceptance, and will not only encourage, but also monitor compliance."

The summary document begins with a glossary defining terms specifically related to subject matter concerns, such as "recursive sharing," "sensitive file type," and "user-originated file," as well as protective measures, such as "affirmative step."

Here are what the summary document points to as the utmost important steps the program needs to address:

1) default settings
2) file-sharing controls
3) shared-folder configurations
4) user-error protections
5) sensitive-file-type restrictions
6) file-sharing status communications
7) developer principles

P2P file-sharing software applications will be fitting some well-established principles with regard to feature disablement, uninstallation, new-version upgrades, and file-sharing settings.

In the end, there’s also an eighth optional step for added consumer protection having to do with inactive states of the P2P file-sharing program included.

(www.DCIA.info)