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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?"
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...
Scoble is a somewhat-famous blogger. He became known in that community a few years back when he was working for Microsoft; he was considered unusual in that he was a "company spokesman" who didn't speak in press releases, and openly criticized Microsoft from time to time. He's since moved on to starting his own company which does some sort of video podcasting thing.
The story in question here is that he got himself banned from Facebook by using a beta version of a program which was designed to log into your account and start screen-scraping out your friends' info, theoretically for purposes of slurping it into an email addressbook or whatever. Facebook indicated that this violated their terms of service and gave him the boot. He proceeded to raise a stink about how he couldn't get "his" data out of Facebook. He was alternately the subject of sympathy (from people who like him and/or dislike Facebook) and scorn (from people who wondered how exactly someone else's personal info was "his").
As for arguing the reasons of ban. I think any free service will have a clause that says something like,
"... reserves the right to ban / terminate any member account without assigning any reason whatsoever".
I looked up in Facebook terms page. Sure enough, it exists under the heading 'Termination'. Hard to argue after accepting this condition.