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Who Owns Your Social Data? You Do, Sort of
eweekhickins writes "Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble? 'The idea for people to move their social graph from one service to other is a fabulous benefit,' Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales told eWEEK. 'To me, it's a benefit to customers. People should be very wary about services that are uptight about that kind of thing in an effort to lock you out of the customer.' The problem is that while the profile data may be yours and yours alone, your address book contains the names and e-mail addresses of your friends, family and business contacts. So who owns the data?"
Possession is 9 tenths of the law, right? The guy with the disk has the data. Controlling your personal data once it's not on a medium you physically can control access to is about the same impossible problem as DRM.
You own information you created, end of story. If i don't own my personal address book, then no one has the right to own any IP. I'm guessing no one wants to open THAT can o worms?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You may "own the data" but you don't control the version of the server software that hosts, accesses, and manipulates that data. If SocialNetworkDuJour.com decides to implement super nifty web 3.0 whizzy stuff that is not compatible with your OS or browser, then your data is no longer accessible to you. Sure, you can complain bitterly about the "upgrade" but if you use a minority OS or browser, your complaints won't get too far. The lack of client-level version control is a real problem with social networks and other web-based software concepts.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
with the invalidated markup slashdot is spitting out, I can post anything I want and noone will see it. So I own my data.
I like microsoft
I sometimes enjoy watching pornographic movies with no females in them
Sometimes I dream about Jack Thompson
looked like that too a minute ago, seems to have got better now. A few minutes ago i was getting a service not available error.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
After the whole Robert Scoble fiasco, I wrote a Firefox extension that saves the data from your Facebook friends' profiles (including their e-mail addresses) in CSV format as you view them so that you can import that data into other mail clients or social networks.
Possession is 9 tenths of the law, right?
Nope. It gets repeated often enough, but has no basis in law. It's right up there with "cops gotta tell you they're a cop if you ask them directly."
Though I suppose being in possession of stolen goods...
I am getting disappointed with the way Slashdot frames questions. The other day, they ran http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/03/1347236 whose contents in my opinion were not in sync with the title. May be these Slashdot folks need a refresher course.
I guess the bank owns your money, since they keep it as data in their servers.
I got a 503 for a couple minutes there before that, a rare sight indeed!
The question is devoid of meaning. No one owns data.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory"
my variation on http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DifferenceBetweenTheoryAndPractice
Which is, BTW, the original wiki.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
(an edited rendition of my response to the Techdirt article on this same topic)
One citizen's relationship to another, and the rules by which that relationship (and its details) are made available to some subset of the world, must exist outside any specific social network, tool, or other Web site.
Social network sites should offer "individually calibrated privacy controls", which should encompass who should see what information, and not just within a single social network/tool/site. Compliant sites should, therefore, only block exports of information that are themselves blocked by the privacy controls and overall standards/rules for social graph data exchange, not a blanket "you can't export anything" or "you can't export email addresses" or "we own your data, so go suck eggs" or some such.
Both the Techdirt and eWeek articles have an inappropriate focus — exclusively on Facebook. PR notwithstanding, Facebook is not a social network — it is a tool that facilitates the publicizing of the real-world social network. Facebook is merely a window on the world — it is not the world. Or, to put it another way, Facebook is not a social graph -- it is a tool that helps people describe the real-world social graph. The fact that "portability" even has to be raised as an issue is a matter of greed among tool-makers like Facebook, who labor under the naive supposition that they somehow own everybody's relationships with everyone else. I liken it to firms who try to copyright facts.
We need standards, rules, and watchdogs for adherence to the rules for this information, so privacy is truly up to the individuals, not based on some set of meta-rules unique to some site (e.g., can't export email addresses). And, we need the tool-makers to follow the standards and rules, plus respect the watchdogs. IMHO, tool-makers that are venture-backed will need to be beaten soundly over the head repeatedly in order for them to make those agreements...which is why the Scoble incident is useful. Criticizing Facebook for cases like this is going to be necessary to force change.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
You can't separate data from what it means. My bank account may be a six digit number it reflects the contents of my account and thus, that 'data' is mine.
The real question shouldn't be "who owns the data", but should we encourage webapp providers to create an easy mechanism for import and exporting data? For some webapps it's a no brainer, when it's only one individual's data and there's a great convenience in being able to move formats. But in other cases, such as Facebook, you have to weigh one individual's desire for privacy against others' convenience. That is, while people do share their e-mail address, IM contact info, and sometimes even cell phone numbers, it's hard to believe that they did so with the intention of being sold to marketers or ripped into some other database. That's why Facebook has put e-mail addresses into images for a long time -- it defeats some fraction of potential abusers. So where's the balance?
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
How come such a well written book never got a publishing deal?
"Anthony met Maximillian years ago during their time as operatives for an extreme right wing sect of the neo-con Republican Party"
"One second. I am getting my head together"
"President's photographic memory raced calling up"
Shit, it's like a bad episode of Michael Moore Does Fanfic
If you buy on credit, a record is kept of everything you buy and when you bought it. Remember all those figures about christmas sales. Many of those come from mastercard. Retailers and analysts will pay money for the breakdown of those sales. Do you get compensated for you data? Only in the way that if you have good credit the companies can afford to give you money for free.
So, all facebook and most social networking sites are free. Users voluntarily put huge amounts of data on themselves. What do you expect to happen? The companies just to sit on such a gold mine and not exploit it? It is just like those forms you fill out to win a free car or a free gym membership. These are not given out the goodness of someone's heart. No, they want something, to get a phone number, to change your phone company, to get you in the gym so they can pressure you into a membership.
I understand that the kids do not understand that they are being taken for a ride by using these sites, and most adults are not sophisticated enough with computers to understand the scam either. But the rules of the world don't change just because the medium changes. Facebook and myspace have to make a profit and in the age of computers profits are made by those who have the most data and can organize and sell it. If you don't believe me just look at google. These social networking firms provide a service, and in exchange they expect to get huge amounts of data they can sell to make a profit. Maybe it was not that way in the beginning, but now they are corporate, and corporate is reality.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
On-line communities are powerful places to be. Just look at Markos Moulitsas (video warning), the founder of the Daily Kos political blog. What started out as a rant against conservative thinking back in 2002 has now become THE place for Democrats to hang out. Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and lots of other Democratic leaders have now posted comments on that website, which runs on all Free Open Source Software tools, according to the above-linked interview with Markos.
So if you want to be a participant in the power of on-line communities, maybe you are going to have to give up a wee bit of privacy, depending on the community. But look what you get in return: influence and fun. By contrast, those who do not want to participate risk losing relevance, which is one example of the tragedy of the anti-commons. If you are not willing to share something, then just stay off line. Most communities will require you to give *something* to participate: your thinking, some personal information, *something*. Same thing for communities in the physical world. You have to join a group and shake a few hands to participate in the group.
We don't need central repositories like facebook to have social networks. We can do it ourselves in a distributed fashion. Here's how: Friends in Feed.
kinda irrelevant who 'owns' the data.
FaceBook have it now and you can bet your metaphorical hat that they will use it to gain any revenue, business advantage, or advertisement that they can by fair means or foul.
who owns the data? as if the Internet played fair and said "sorry! my mistake" and coughed it up? yeah right.
You want your data from them, then be prepared to claw it out of their cold, dead hands. after taking Beacon and shoving it so far...
He is slightly less an attention whore than Jimmy Jimbo Porno Wales. Scoble made 5,000 "friends" on facebook, which begs the question, who the fuck would befriend such a douchebag? (And I use "btc" correctly here.) And then Scoble tried to move his 5,000 friends' data, not his data, but THEIR data to a different site. In response facebook defaced Scoble and Porno Wales edited an exciting entry all about.
Together they are all damage and my Internet routes around them.
On Vkontakte, your social data owns YOU!
It's VOLUNTARY. When you give your information up to a web site, you are giving them a gift of information. You can't control it after you've copied it over to them any more than the RIAA can control the dissemination of "their" strings of bytes.
expandfairuse.org
The question of data ownership is an interesting one, especially in the light of the Facebook thing. (not entirely understanding why Facebook is so popular with most on /.)
However... what does this have to do with Jumbo Wales? Is he just doing his usual self-promotion and getting his name onto everything this week to promote his new Volkssearchmachine? Seems like a little virally timed to me... he is somewhat expert in viral promotions...
Come to think on it though, he does sell off chunks of other people's Wikipedia contributions to commercial sites. That certainly does raise a data ownership issue he should be questioned about...
The contract agreed upon by the two parties will specify who can do what to the data. This is usually a series of Ts and Cs followed by an "I Agree" widget or the like.
Always read the fine print.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
The whole concept of data ownership is flawed. You can't "own" data. You can have the government back you up when people do something with your data, but that's not "ownership." That's bullying.
Scott McNealy was right when he said privacy was dead. It's not because we *shouldn't* have privacy. It's because it's impossible. Computers gave us the ability to store, index, and access more data than ever before. If you want the benefits, you have to accept the drawbacks. The only thing we can do is mitigate the effects by social agreements. However, social agreements are weak at best, so we have to accept it.
It all comes down to one thing:
YOU CANNOT OWN DATA!
You might be able to keep it secret for a time, but you can't own it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Facebook fanatics? I've been sitting here in my parent's basement in front of a Mac for about 20 minutes now trying to find a 16 year old girl to stalk. 20 minutes. Normally, on Myspace, which by all standards should be a lot slower than Facebook, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this search, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while searching Facebook, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a stalkee who has replied faster than her Myspace counterpart, despite Facebook's much vaunted messaging service. The old Yahoo chatrooms are faster than this Web 2.0 newcomer at times. From a creepy old man standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Facebook is a superior website.
Facebook addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Facebook over other faster, cheaper, more stable sites.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
This isn't a question of who owns the data. Scoble owns the data. It's a question of who controls access to the servers the data's stored on and the services used by the owner to retrieve the data. Scoble doesn't control those, Facebook does. And he's just found out the downside of that. Lesson: don't place your only copy of critical information under the sole control of someone else.
The description and the article seem to be at odds. The article is actually talking about how facebook has an automated script that halts others automated scripts attempting to data mine facebook. Do you want someone data-mining your facebook account? I sure don't, so thank you Facebook.
This isn't a question of someone "owning" the data. It's a question of protecting data from dataminers. At no point does Facebook try to claim ownership of any data in this article, they are trying to protect the data from the unscrupulous (albeit probably for their own safety).
Slashdot will ban you for doing exactly the same thing Scoble (well, the social network/whatever they called it) did. Go on, try using wget to crawl a story's comment thread, or hit the feeds more than once every two hours.
Hell, Slashdot bans you if you get modded down too much in too short a period of time, even if you get modded back up...that was cute.
Please help metamoderate.
Everyone knows the Federation owns Data!
+= E
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
:q!
Kind of self referential.
Gee, who owns "your" address book. I'm betting "you" do.
You have those peoples information in your address book because they gave you permission to put that info in there, by giving you the info. This permission does not apply to third parties. And most people would be pissed if they found out that you were giving out their contact info to third parties.
There is no basis in law, I agree, unless you count history. When you need to litigate and there is discretion because there is no definitive legal precedent, it applies. So ya, it has a basis in PRACTICE. In theory there's no point to fighting every ticket, in practice, it's a good strategy.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Now I am sure this has been said before, because it seems pretty obvious to me... but the only data Scobel can even claim to own, in this strange metaphysical concept of owning we seem to be discussing, is the data he entered into the site - i.e. his own email, address, and the like. If anyone OWNS the data he was collecting, it would be those friends whose profiles he was harvesting from. Now, he could argue that he owns the 'data' that represents that he is friends with these people, but certainly not their address or telephone information. It seems if anything, Facebook is protecting the 'real' owners of the data - his friends - from having their data used in a way they might not have approved of. Now one could reasonably argue that Facebook owns all the data because it was entered into their website and stored on their servers, but it seems clear that Scobel could never make a reasonable claim that he is the one who owns it. If this were the case, and accepting a friendship request on Facebook somehow transfers ownership of my personal information to my new found friend, I would certainly be a lot more selective in accepting friends.
You suddenly become famous or optain a job in the media eye and you find your self being contacted by people you don't want to speak with they seem to be harasing your friends..
You can not remove your info from face book..
Yess you can up your security but you can not remove nor change your name or anything they sorta lock it.. heck you can even get in trouble and be locked out of your stuff..
what if you decided that you no longer want to be a facebook member.. and want your data deleted.. (Can't be done?!!!!!)
there should be no excuse.. there should be a way to be removed
How is this any different than when you write your novel using a product like Microsoft Word and save it on your own disk. If you decide to no longer pay the Microsoft "door man" costs, you can not get that data (in a readable format). The is no specification for the format so you can not even hire a software person to convert it into data. This is also true for people who design stuff in say VISO, AUTOCAD, etc. When the IP is put into an undocumented format they how hold the keys to the house and requires payments to continue to access your own IP.
Well you could use OpenOffice.org or StarOffice to read that novel.
I don't know about the VISO or AUTOCAD.
How about a fancy form that is created in WORD using their macros or an EXCEL spread sheet full of their macros. This will not be handled by OOo.
I am growing sick of these juvenile debates. Scobie and everyone else went to the Facebook site, filled in a registration form then clicked to accept the Terms and Conditions. What is left to debate? Nothing!
Don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Don't sign up!
Want to use Facebook but still don't want to let Facebook know your phone number? Sign up with a one time Hotmail address and then don't fill in any of the personal data!
For God's sake people, this is not rocket science.
As far as Scobie - and no, I haven't read TFA - his gripe does not seem to be about his own personal data, aka the phone number mentioned above, it seems to be that Facebook wants to prevent him from collecting other user's data in an automated fashion. Surely it is Facebook's option to provide those people with at least that minimal amount of privacy?
Three Squirrels
Facebook allows you to import your friends from Gmail, Yahoo, and the like, but Facebook's terms of service forbid you from using similar tools to export your Facebook friends to another website. If you try to use software to do this, Facebook may deactivate your account. We must demand that Facebook allow us to use tools to take the data gleaned from our social connections that we've entered here and, with our friends consent, export it however and wherever we wish. If you agree and are on Facebook, join this group to send them a message and spread awareness. For more on the issue, visit http://dataportability.org/ and http://opensocialweb.org/
Question though, if what is controlled is the server, and not the information, what is to stop someone using a Firefox plugin to grab their own data back.
Winton
Who the fuck cares about this?
I think the "ownership" that's being asserted here is Facebook asserting that it owns the data about friend relationships and friend email and can limit what users like Scoble can do with it, and that it's doing that because it thinks users will be happier that way than if anybody can do anything they want with that info. For instance
But if you're a social-network provider, how do you decide what's the boundary between Contact-management services that are ok, and services that will annoy your users? Should you be more conservative than your average user, with a blanket policy against them, to avoid the risk that some of those services will annoy your user base? Should you be more liberal than average, because your users will get annoyed if you're overreachingly picky? Should you default to a greedy-capitalist approach that treats that contact information as your treasured marketing product that you don't want to share with other possibly-competing service providers?
I think Facebook probably overreacted here. I'd expect them to be more conservative than Myspace, but this probably goes too far.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Possession makes some sense in absence of law, but law is designed to balance possesion with other issues. A thief may *control* your expensive HiFi set after a burglary because they now *possess* it, but they don't *own* it according to law.
If it is in the US, I have no idea. But if it is in EU, there is this slightly interesting bit of data protection, which gives me a right of checking, correcting and deleting any personal data retained on their server. Meaning if I would leave such an european service for another , I can ask them to delete the data, and they HAVE to do it by law. Whatever the contract said, since the contract has to respect the european data protection law, and cannot nullify a law.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"The whole concept of data ownership is flawed. You can't "own" data. You can have the government back you up when people do something with your data, but that's not "ownership." That's bullying."
ALL PROPERTY RIGHT are a form of "bullying" by the local government. THINK about it. If the local government was not bullying everybody in recognizing your own property right, including your home, your car, and your "life", then ANYBODY could steal/kill it from you at any moment, kick you out of your car/house and say "now it is mine because i am stronger than you (evil laugh)" and have no repercussion whatsoever. Which is why we have laws to recognize your rights to property and keep it. If there were not those laws, you would own NOTHING. And society would be anarchy. From the step of recognizing your right to own a physical things, to the step of your right to own easily copied bits, is only a small step. You can argue out of the blue that those are not "physical", but BOTH are right awarded (sorry , bullied as you say) by the government. Where to put the line on what procession/monopoly usage right the government should give or not give has been decided many many years ago when copyright laws were made (I am not arguying those are good laws, mind you). From the step of copyright law existing, to the step of arguying that your own data should be your "own", is very small. A step mind you which has been made years ago (15?20?) in the EU, where you have a right to check and correct any data that a firm or government has on you.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I loaded up about 20 stories I hadn't yet seen, and when I browsed the comments, boom, they're gone.
...did I /. /.?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Some people are posting that you cannot own your data. That depends on what data you are talking about in the first place. Let's be specific.
Intellectual Property owners clearly own their data. A common man is no different. He owns his data as well. Any data he creates himself he owns solely. He also maintains numerous rights, under various licensing agreements, to data owned by other entities. His music, movies, books, etc.
A better question is.... Does one own data they voluntarily give to the government and/or corporations?
I would say no. You do not own it. I would say you have the right to make corrections, but not force its removal entirely. It's kind of like a form of libel. You have the right to make sure that they are maintaining correct data, but not whether or not they CAN maintain the data itself. Since you are giving this information voluntarily, you are really just giving them broad license to your data. Try actually reading the privacy statements as that is their official position on what they will do with the data you *own* that you are *lending* to them in perpetuity. You agreed to it. They did not sign something that said after 5 years they must delete it completely. Or did you make them? Different in every situation.
What about data that is derived from actions performed under a legal contract between 2 entities?
That data was never 100% yours to begin with. You have a contract with Visa. The fact is that you used your contractual rights to have VISA pay for your purchase. You obviously have to pay them back at some point. The specifics of that transaction, which could be construed to be "data", does in fact belong to VISA, and they have as much right to it as you do. I am sure there are some contractual terms that allow for privacy, but those are agreed upon by both parties. VISA won't publicly make available that you specifically purchased a 30 day visit to www.fatchickswithbeards.com (just as an example, I am NOT typing that into my web browser to check). However, you could choose to list every single credit card transaction you ever did on your personal web page and VISA has no recourse.
This is all about what happens contractually after the data you own, or co-create, gets stored by corporations or government.
I don't have:
* A MySpace profile
* A Facebook profile
* A free email account (with real information) on any big provider
* Any social networking account of any kind
* A list of any of my contacts and information about people I know anywhere online
Now that I think of it, I don't have any data of any kind anywhere. On websites at least. In fact, the email addresses I use are aliases that I can remove at any time. My physical addresses are all fakes, even for government maintained databases. My utilities are listed under other entities that contain a tax id as a reference, which if you dug that up would lead to other data that does not ultimately lead to me anyways. It only leads to people that represent me. The best you could do is finally find a cellphone number, call me (which my PDA phone has software that rejects anonymous calls and unknown calls). If you had enough levels of access, you could just triangulate me from my cellphone signal, but I have plans to eliminate that soon......
I don't have a tinfoil cap on my head, but I am obviously a very private person, and paranoid to boot, but I don't have these online accounts since I cannot contractually bind those people to my own level of satisfaction. I utilize a couple of online companies to do work for me, but those have strong SLA's and I have legal recourse if they misuse my data. I use an online accounting firm, and I have the permanent rights to all that data. I checked.
So since I so methodically protect information about myself, I can say that, "You get what you pay for", or don't pay for, for that matter.
I guess people should start really reading the privacy statements and Service Level Agreements of t
What Robert leaves out of the story that there has been a 3rd party facebook application to gosh download your friends email addresses.. Robert did not even have to void is FB user agreement.. So what is Robert smoking folks?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Actually, the bank does own the money you deposit there. When you open an account and deposit the money, the ownership is transferred to the bank. You get a claim against the bank for the amount of the deposit. The bank becomes your debtor, but the actual money is no longer yours.
The difference is that money can't be copied without incurring a loss of value, but information can, and indeed may thereby increase in value.
"Good news, everyone!"
The concept of "owning" any kind of information once you've given it out is certifiably insane. You might be the creator, but bottom line is once you've given it away (i.e. storing it with something you have little to no control over) the best you can be to that little tidbit of data is a viewer, maintainer, or, if you're very lucky, administrator.
I think most people simply have a problem of mapping physical things (where there's a relatively easy means to establish ownership) to meta-physical things. If I give you one of my cookies, it's yours to do with as you please. The same holds true if I give you my name, address, phone, birthday, etc. You could make your own copies in your own places, or hand that information out, or even modify your versions of that information. It doesn't matter how many instances of that information exist in other people's hands, the only instance that I control is the one in my own hands.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. I give some website credit card information about me that is stored in my user profile. A few weeks later I cancel that credit card and am issued a new one with a new number. Now last time I checked, credit card companies don't ask you, "Would you like to change all your user profiles everywhere to reflect the canceled status of your old number?" The profiles that have that old credit card number will still have that same old credit card number until you or someone else who has access to that profile goes in and modifies it. Consider this: Sites aren't required to allow you to modify that bit of information. They're not even obligated to allow you to see it again if they didn't want to. In essence, once you gave them that information, they owned that *instance* of information. That information may not have any worth attributed to it, but they do own it. Bottom line, being able to access (in any way) the information you've given to a 3rd party is strictly a privilege granted by that 3rd party should they be so inclined.
Obviously many places that have even an ounce of credibility to their name go through the process of defining terms and conditions of the data they collect and how it can be used. However, even with terms and conditions agreements, it boils down to the trust one can put into a recipient vs. the intrinsic value of the having information to be provided. So everyone out there saying that "their" information has just as many rights to privacy as "they" do should just check themselves into a loony bin for thinking they have any control over something they willingly gave away (regardless of price or even "agreements").
Most security buffs will tell you that if you really value your milk and cookies, then don't hand them out.
Could someone explain this phrase, "social graph"? I haven't run into this before. And what is "your social graph" versus someone else's? Is it just your set of friends? What would it mean to move your social graph to another service, if the friends there are different or have different names?
Marshall Kirkpatrick posted an interesting article on the subject (and actually a day before the whole Facebook-scoble story)