A group representing the Digitari of our era — Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington — teamed up to write and post what they’re calling “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.”

The document is mercifully short, and lays out these rights in a very succinct way. The document addresses data ownership, control over this information, and freedom to distribute this information in the manner the owner sees fit.

This is great stuff, as it defines the rights of service consumers versus providers. But it does leave an open question: how does it apply to users within corporate settings, using corporate networks? We already know that email and IM messaging is not the “personal property” of the originators, but that of the company from which it originated.

The Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web reads as follows:

“We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.”