Slashdot Mirror
Who Owns Your Social Identity?
wjousts writes "Who actually owns your username on a website? What rights do you have to use it? An IEEE Spectrum podcast reports: 'What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It's happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog's name to someone else.' And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them — and who does? — you'd learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more than they protect you."
whoever has more money gets their way.. it really is that simple. in this case the host will give the name to the one who is most likely to sue and who has the financial backing to do so. I miss the days of first-come-first-serve on the internet.
...you could lose a gem like this one.
Not just money to sue. But a service whose entire revenue model is dependent on customer generated content creating ad impressions is more likely to hand an identity from someone who produces little revenue to one they think will generate more ad impressions. (So you're safer if your social identity is a big traffic generator, say like a Scoble.)
Why, the same thing that protects you if someone steals your identity in the real world.
Unicorns, vigilante superheroes and the goodwill of corporations like Mastercard - all in equal measure.
I'm torn on this. As much as I would like the server operators to have control as to what they do with their machines and the data, there is a trust relationship between the users and the service provider, and some rights that users should have are being violated in the name of profits--which is a sign that the model is breaking down in the face of a changing reality and needs to be changed--whenever you see humanity acting as a tool to serve the economy and not the other way around you should reexamine you priorities and goals.
I'd like some sort of first come first serve system, but then you get cyber-squatters who buy up domains with no intention of using them just to extort money from people who would like to put them to good use; the same could be possible with usernames on popular sites but I'm not sure if that's happened before. The question is, how do you stop the squatters while protecting the rights of the little guy who got their first and is legitimately using a username or domain that a big powerful corporation or well connected individual has their eye on?
I was able to register the vanity URL for my real name on Facebook, but if some more famous or powerful person came around with my same name (possible, it's that uncommon of a name) and wanted to take that URL from me I'd want there to be some protection against that. I registered the name first, it's my name so my claim to it is just as valid, money or power shouldn't have a say in who gets it and that seems to be a gap where we need legislation to protect people from the service operators.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
On a similar topic, could Facebook create an account for you "on your behalf" using information acquired from other sources where the fine print said they were allowed to share it?
..is headkase. I've been using it since 2001. Around 2005 I learned there was an Australian band called: Headkase. We have yet to cross paths and I doubt there is even interest, and besides: mine is a lower-case "h" and theirs is upper.. ;)
Shh.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/04/27/tumblr-disappeared-me.html
Uh, if keeping your online identity is that important to you, then why not just buy your own domain?
What, did you think that Facebook or Twitter were obligated to keep your username intact? If you were on my system, would I be obligated to keep your username and account intact (politeness aside)?
Palm trees and 8
Big hosting companies don't care that it's counterproductive. They have policies.
Best to buy a domain name for yourself.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Best to buy a domain name for yourself.
Exactly: if you need an online identity that you control, buy your own domain. It is not terribly hard to do, and it is not terribly expensive.
Palm trees and 8
how does one link one's own services to the services that people actually use?
With RSS? Or perhaps by sending people a link (that is, the kind that the web itself was built on)? Really, this is a problem that was solved a long time ago (perhaps everyone has forgotten the solution).
Palm trees and 8
There should be a law against this. Something to enforce your right to control copies of your creative work, and maybe something to make sure nobody uses your unique names, logos, and marks to steal your business trade. We could call it a "copyright and trademark law".
I realize that supporting copyright and trademark law is heresy on Slashdot, but this is *exactly* the sort of situation it was designed to help with. The service provider has the right to shut you down if they want, but if you have trademarked "zephoria" -- a unique identifying phrase which is eminently trademarkable -- they can't re-purpose it without your express permission.
sadly, the website owner is the one that rules :-/
How can this be "sadly"? So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure? Come on, on what world are you living?
That guy and his wife just got what they paid for, and the only person they have to blame is themselves for being greedy, or trusting enough someone they don't know, and give out personal content. Would you give your personal diary to a random person on the street? Same issue here.
Hosting a blog on your own website doesn't cost much, I'm sure you could find such a shared hosting service for less than 20USD / year.
The number of Facebook users proves you wrong.
With all the shit talking people do here on RMS, he's right on a lot of fundamental things. This includes his campaign against cloud services.
The only reason you would have your host rename your blog or account with no regard to you is because you are not your own host. People enter into these disgusting one sided contracts multiple times per day and then they're surprised when the party holding all the cards actually plays them. It's the definition of stupidity.
Willingly signing your rights away and then run around crying when you get shafted. Then you run crying to the politicians because now you need them to fix it, you don't care what they do but something must be done about it. And of course they seize the moment to push through whatever power grabbing measures that only go one way, ratcheting away everyone else's freedoms too with all sorts of unintended consequences.
Same reason I'll never get a damn kindle.
Liberty.
I've often pondered that question, and I keep coming to the conclusion that a perfectly good system exists for that: RSS feeds. A lot of proper blogging services (LiveJournal et al) provide RSS by default with any blog. Twitter doesn't, afaik, and neither does Facebook - they prefer to keep all the users in their own walled-off ecosystem, just like AOL did once upon a time.
Straight RSS feeds don't allow for comments and/or replies, of course, so it's effectively limited to following; but then you can always reply on the actual service, or "retweet" a comment on your own preferred service.
And, best of all, RSS is already incorporated in most products people use. I have a load of RSS feeds nicely plugged into my Mozilla bookmarks. I suspect IE, Chrome and Opera also support a similar mechanism. There's Google Feed Reader or whatever it's called, and uncountable ticker widgets for the desktop of your choice.
No, I utterly fail to see the technical problem. The main issue, I think, is the current obsession with "social media" - popularity measured by the number of people who click "friend" or "I like" on you; whcih is of course heavily encouraged by Zucherberg et al so they can keep mining everyone's data.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure?
If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
I always wonder if people who say "if you're not taking someone's money you don't owe them anything" apply that principle to their daily lives. Do you refuse to send birthday cards to your family unless they pay you to do it? Do you tell your friend, "sure, I'll give you a ride to the store in an hour," and then, when he calls two hours later asking where you are, laugh at him and tell him how stupid he was to think you'd help him out for free? Do you turn the other way when you see a little kid about to wander out into traffic, because hey, it's not like the little brat's going to pay you to pull him out of the way of an oncoming car? How far are you willing to go in service to this vile principle in which you claim to believe?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Of course, if you read that you'll notice it's not the first time Tumblr have done this. Probably not the last time either.
buy your own domain.
RTFA. She has-- TFA is on her own domain.. However, there are plenty of online communities one may wish to join (eg, even Slashdot) and prefer to use the same identity (e.g., login name). You have to be a member, with a name, to participate. And thus come under the control of the owners of that service.
Yeah, but if you have some crazy moon TLD like "co.uk" people are going to assume you're some kind of evil haxx0r. ;)