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Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
technirvana sends us to ReadWriteWeb for the scoop on the announcement this morning that representatives from Google and Facebook are joining the DataPortability Workgroup. Quoting: "The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era in which users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere... Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet. The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history — what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data."
"Walled-garden, data horders"???
Nothing like emotional polarization rather than rational discussion. Is the poster running for president or something?
I would like a system where the servers and services using the system doesn't actually have access to YOUR information, but rather has access to links to your information. That information would, in turn, be controlled by the owner of that information. Such a system would be truly opt-in creating a marketing system that people could truly opt-out of. It would also be immeasurably more valuable to marketers as the information would have a higher quality of demographic selection along with more guaranteed delivery of content.
If such a system were to catch on, we'd be a lot closer to the end of spam and similar marketing practices. I can't imagine we'd be rid of it entirely, but wouldn't it be nice?
> I think we'll see more and more that people are going to be known by their avatars rather than their actual name as data becomes universal like this.
What's funny is that I go out of my way to make sure my avatar is unknown, in the sense that there is no tie with my real name in any way, on any website/forum/whatever. If you google my avatar, all you find is which websites I used that avatar, and what I posted using that avatar, but nothing else about me. In fact, I even switch avatars; one avatar for different websites.
The threat I see from this is the potential that you cannot avoid having your real name linked to your avatar's... or you would have to go out of your way to maintain explicitly seperate online persona's: one for your actual name, and one for every avatar you choose!
Most of the data people want to move around has obvious formats, and where there aren't obvious formats, the first people to do something reasonable get to set the standard. What are some of the things Google and Facebook can do right now?
There are commonly used formats for contact info, addresses, appointments, todo lists, notes, and bookmarks. For images, Google could offer downloading of a zip of an album or all albums. For documents and document backup, Google could offer downloading of a zip of a folder or the entire collection. Mail can be backed up via IMAP pretty well, but a zipped mbox file might also be nice. For information in search results and other web pages, Google could use microformats.
So, talk if you like, but these companies can do a lot better than they are doing right now without waiting for some grand standard or consensus.
Does Amazon participate in this? They hold a ton of personal data whenever I make a purchase from them. Hell, whenever I sign into their site they keep track of all the items I have ever viewed.
It seems that there are so many ways for a website to get *my* data.
(a) personal data supplied (forms on their site that I fill in),
(b) friend data supplied (form on their site that my friend fills in),
(c) browsing data semi-supplied (pages on their site that I look at),
(d) 3rd party supplied data, (forms on other sites that I filled in)
If all of these data sources cannot be controlled by the end user (what gets aggregated where)... then I am going to have to find myself another Internet.
And yes, I don't like that Facebook gets personal data from 3rd Party Sites unless I specifically say they can (i.e. "Go Search Gmail for New Contacts to Add"). LinkedIn (I believe) does this search without asking you.
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TWO? No. Not even close. Google sure -- they have lots of user data and are surely important in the recent history of the Web. But Facebook isn't even the biggest in its own field. Love it or hate it, Myspace still has many, many more users and much more influence. They may still be drowning in OMG Ponies!!!1! glitter, but they have the backing of one of the worlds biggest (and scariest) media empires.
Facebook is in all likelihood little more than a fad. They're not ground breaking, nor especially innovative, they are not leaders in their field (unless, maybe, you could user protest and rebellion figures).
Thus, my conclusion is that this "article" was brought to you (at least indirectly) by the Marketing Droids over at Facebook.
That said, the principle of portable data and removal of proprietary walled gardens is certainly a good thing.
Perhaps it seems that way, but consider if this were viewed as the next evolution of email systems where the sender were more verifiable. I do believe that there can't be a security or privacy system that can't be broken or compromised, but if delivery of messages were contingent on the recipient's authorization rather like some instant messaging systems are today, the worst you might see is a constant flow of authorization requests which would be as annoying as direct spam, but could be presented to the user in some digest form on a periodic basis for their review rather than in the form of millions of little requests. Then the recipient could allow the sender's messages through based on their opt-in selection which could be revoked one the user's request.
I would think of such a system as part of EMail-2.0 standards whatever they end up being, but it wouldn't be proprietary and would be available for every client and server to implement... and it wouldn't be patent encumbered... ah what a lovely dream.
But such a dream would be valuable to legitimate users and legitimate marketers. One of the problems with internet marketing is the vagueness of demographic targeting systems. At least with radio and TV advertising, the demographic can be fairly well defined. With the internet, it's filled with problems and fraudulent activity. But a system that provided more accuracy for the marketer as well as a way for the end user to cut off the senders before it hits their in boxes? What a great system that could be. That would only leave the illegitimate marketers out in the cold... continuing their hacking... writing code that would make the users' computers opt-in to things they don't want.
I can't imagine I am the only one who has thought of such systems... I'm not a particularly smart or clever person, so if I thought of it and it's a good idea, then the chances are that someone else already thought of it and implemented it 10 years ago... and if I thought of it and it's a bad idea... well, that's just par for the course.
Basically facebook is already two-faced, so their participation in this seems like it could be a mission to slow/derail/control development. Yesterday's article on facebook banning those who use aggregators from their site (with user permission) is just one example of where facebook does one thing and demands another.
In addition to one-sided policies, facebook has a feature system that requires you to give full access to any application any of your friends is using/spamming you with--just to receive their message. Every time I get a message on that site I am required to add the application and check 4 boxes giving full access to my information (there is no middle road) in order to read the message.
Facebook's privacy functionality is completely unacceptable to me but seems okay with the huge numbers of folks adding 3 feet of application on their profiles. Sadly, I suspect facebook is not a fad, but instead a new and more obnoxious myspace with even less privacy controls--and a poorer track record.
oops. that was a rant.
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"To say that the backdrop is 'recession like' is akin to an obstetrician telling a woman that she is 'sort of pregnant'" -- Merrill Lynch
Anonymity on the net is not quite what it used to be.
This isn't true. You can be FAR more anonymous on the net today than you could 10 or certainly 15 years ago. The sheer number of people using it gives you a lot of cover; when there were fewer users and sites, it was a lot easier to backtrack and figure out who a person was.
Plus, the privacy and encryption tools have gotten a lot better. I don't think there has ever been a time in history when individuals had access to encryption that's as secure as what you can download for free right now. Same with anonymity systems like Tor (although I'd argue it has more historical and physical-world analogs; e.g. the mail is pretty anonymous). Look at how many hoary old plaintext protocols we're still burdened with, left over from more naive times.
All that's required is a desire to have privacy and anonymity, or perhaps better put, a refusal to give it up for a few convenience features here and there. Obviously you lose privacy if you use GMail and store everything on Google's servers. But nobody is making you do that; if you do regular POP/SMTP+GPG, you can have better security today than with any previous generation of system. It's only when you want to be on the (relatively) bleeding edge -- where, as is typical and certainly not new, features have been added without much thought to privacy or security -- that you have to give anything up.
If anything, people are becoming more and more concerned with data security, not less.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wait there. To be fair you can export data from Outlook. Outlook will let you export your address book, mail and calendar, Google will not. Google will let you download all of your mail, but there is nothing for exporting your address book. (And to be fair, you really don't have a Google address book do you? It just caches the names of everyone and uses an autocomplete feature to make it feel like you do.)
I keep a Google Calendar for personal stuff and one in Outlook at work for scheduled meetings and so forth (Fortune 500, so I can't just tell everyone I'm not going to use Outlook anymore). Once I decided to export my Outlook calendar and import it into Google's so I could see my upcoming meetings from home later that day and plan my next month's schedule. Worked great, no problem at all. Then about a week later I decided to do the same thing backwards, export from Google and load that data into Outlook. Well, Google offers no such feature. I *could* "share" my personal calendar (give it an address that anyone can view) and import it that way, but I don't like the idea of making my calendar viewable to the world while I do the import.
And this is coming from a Google fan who has four Google related Firefox Prizm icons on his desktop (Gmail, Calendar, Reader and Docs).
Get your Unix fortune now!
Want to use Outlook? Good luck sharing your address book with Gmail or (hah) Thunderbird
Gosh, I must be extremely lucky; I typed "export contacts" in Outlook help, and, what do you know, I got a link to an article helpfully named "Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail". Just export your Outlook contact list as a CSV file and import it into GMail. Trivial.
As Mark Pilgrim said, "Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel." It's depressing that this isn't all a given.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Speech is free--use it at your own risk.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
This argument -- that is, the "I want to keep everything separate!" argument -- always seems to come up when stuff like this is under discussion. The important thing to bear in mind is that these technologies are there to enable you to link profiles and transfer data between sites. There's nothing forcing you to do so. If you continue to maintain a separate profile for each site, then you haven't gained nor lost anything.
I currently have a "work" persona and a "personal" persona, plus a whole bunch of vaugely-anonymous personas. These new technologies like OpenID and so on have been a boon for my "personal" persona, but haven't had any effect whatsoever on the one-off "anonymous" personas I have on certain sites, even where those sites have support for these linking/sharing technologies.