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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 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.
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.
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 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?
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
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.
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 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.
Everyone knows the Federation owns Data!
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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.
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