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?"

Um. The guy with the storage?

[Reality Master 201]

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.

Who?

[Matt Perry]

Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble?

Nope, because I don't know who he is or how he was treated. How about a better summary so people know what you are talking about?

So who owns the data?

[John Hasler]

The question is devoid of meaning. No one owns data.

Should webapps provide easy import/export?

[compumike]

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?

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

the entity that collects it, apparently

[fermion]

If you go into a store and use one of the affinity cards, the details of the transaction can be stored, collated, and sold. The store can offer to sell you much or your order at cost because the store in no longer in the retail business, but in the data trading business.

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.

Re:The question provides the answer!

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer to "Who Owns Your Social Data?" is in the question itself. It's like asking..."Who owns your shirt?" Of course me. Of course me. I repeat...I own my property. Period.

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 an index & page numbers.

Jimmy Wales can talk about the benefit of being nice to the customer all he wants, but there has to be is clear legal rights of ownership by individuals and the public. Copyright was supposed to be about that the beginning, but that's gone to hell. Being nice doesn't cut it.

One more time...

[rastoboy29]

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.

Amen, Brotha!

[Tony]

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.

Wrong question

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Re:Who?

[zenslug]

Here's his wikipedia link:
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 the man's own words from his blog:
http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/ [scobleizer.com]

"My account has been "disabled" for breaking Facebook's Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account."

I didn't know who he was until looking him up, either. The summary could have been a lot clearer.

Re:Incorrect. The contract defines who owns what.

[canuck57]

Always read the fine print.

Yep, and one of the things is we reserve the tight to change it without notice. Gotta love that.