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Who Owns Your Social Data? You Do, Sort of
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 04, 2008 06:19 PM
from the don't-kid-yourself dept.
from the don't-kid-yourself dept.
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?"
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Your Rights Online: Facebook A Black Hole For Personal Info 242 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an article on how Facebook is so sticky it is nearly impossible to get loose. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network. 'It's like the Hotel California,' said Nipon Das, a user who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account. 'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.' It took Mr. Das two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook's customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das's empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network. Facebook's quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has increased concerns about the network's potential abuse of private data, especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature."
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Um. The guy with the storage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Um. The guy with the storage? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Parent
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Re:Um. The guy with the storage? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I guess the bank owns your money, since they keep it as data in their servers.
In a way, they do, yes. For instance, that's how they finance loans: lending your money to someone else, asking a fee for the service, and paying you a prize for letting them use your money while they hold it for you. They earn their money from the fee/prize discrepancy, but your money is what enables their business in the first place.
...There's "just" the matter of
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.
Incorrect. The contract defines who owns what. (Score:4, Interesting)
Always read the fine print.
Cheers.
Parent
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Always read the fine print.
Yep, and one of the things is we reserve the tight to change it without notice. Gotta love that.
Where is the firm signing the contract ? (Score:2)
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It becomes more difficult if they say: sign this or you will get no medical treatment. Sign this, or you do not get a drivers licence. Sign this, or you do not get a free pencil.
The line between extortion and a deal where both parties benefit can be very thing and I do not know where the line is.
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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.
You do. (Score:2)
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If you aren't showing any data to anyone then you belong to a social networking site for no reason.
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Actually I suspect a lot of people just try it out of curiosity. I did. That's how I found out about Gmail several years ago and I've been using it ever since.
With Facebook though, I tried it, and partially because of security concerns quickly concluded the whole concept (and implementation) sucked. Fortunately I hadn't provided much information during the sign-up, and most of what I did provide was fake.
Ownership vs. Actions, Politeness vs. Copyability (Score:2)
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 wa
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nice job otherwise genius.
But who owns version control? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble [wikipedia.org]
"Scoble is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft."
According to a blog on the NYTimes:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/facebook-robert-scoble-and-free-love/ [nytimes.com]
"Mr. Scoble was kicked off of Facebook because he used a preview version of a Plaxo service that logged onto his Facebook account to download the names and e-mail addresses of his friends."
In
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
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").
Parent
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"... 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.
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I'm the green ones.
Own your Facebook data (Score:5, Informative)
The question provides the answer! (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org] whose contents in my opinion were not in sync with the title. May be these Slashdot folks need a refresher course.
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Well that's a great example because you actually don't have full ownership to your clothes: Got a Nike or Diesel Sweeties t-shirt? Yeah, that single shirt is yours, but you don't own it enought to make more of them.
'Who Owns Your Social Data?' has similar legal grey area, sort of like copyrighting national laws based on giving them a
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The answer to "Who Owns Your Social Data?" is in the question itself. It's like asking..."Who owns your shirt?" Of course me. I repeat...I own my property. Period.
Do you, or does the people represented by the data own the data? As TFA says "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." Those people should be able to control that data. Unless I have the ok of whoever is r
So who owns the data? (Score:5, Insightful)
Guerrilla Action, Reposted (Score:2)
(an edited rendition of my response to the Techdirt [techdirt.com] 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
Should webapps provide easy import/export? (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
the entity that collects it, apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
hoarders suffer the tragedy of the anti-commons (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
heh. (Score:2)
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...
One more time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen, Brotha! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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Music is data
Art is data
Novels are data
Games are data
Source code is data
All these things can be owned, sold, borrowed and stolen under our current laws. The reason for the high valuation of Facebook is because they have aggregated a huge amount of data, and are looking to make money from it. They quite literally own the social lives of some of their customers, as set out in the terms of agreement which let those customers use their server. Call me old-fashioned, but I wouldn't trust a sl
I like bullying (Score:2)
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 a
Yes, but... (Score:2)
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 pe
A question for Facebook fans (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Wrong question (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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hard for slashdot editors to get uppity about this (Score:2)
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.
United Federation of Planets (Score:2, Funny)
Uh - Maybe he Should Have Read Before Clicking? (Score:2)
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
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Most people I associate with only have a facebook account because it was the only way to see their nieces wedding photos, or to rsvp to a family gathering, or some nonsense like that. They didn't WANT their own profile, they didn't WANT to provide any information for their friends to use, and they most certainly had no interest whatsoever providing any information for fac
Similar thing discussed in December's Wired Mag. (Score:2)
Winton
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Sometimes I dream about Jack Thompson