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My Social Network Data Is Not Yours To Steal or Borrow
I had a lengthy conversation this morning with Steve Poland about Robert Scoble getting banned from Facebook. Apparently Scoble was banned due to "stealing" user info and taking it outside the Facebook network. What we discussed was whether Robert had a right to take my data outside of Facebook without my permission – hence the stealing in quotes. Robert claims that he only took "Names and email address and birthday" from Facebook and planted it into some new function that Robert is testing for Plaxo.
During our conversation, Steve said, "when you add someone as a friend, that friend isn’t saying, "yeah, and feel free to export this info and use elsewhere".
When I think of open, I initially think of being able to take my data with me. My blog entries, my funwall posts, my links, my photos, etc. But to take my friend’s data seems to start a different conversation around openness. How much data is too much? Should Scoble be allowed to take my name/email and birthdate without my permission? For an identity hacker, that’s all they need to be able to wipe a person’s life which takes years to repair.
How does today’s news change our views on open social graph/networks? Looks like we need levels of openness with regards to social networks.
Here are some thought starters:
- If a friend can see it (re: data point), is it theirs to take?
- Should I be able to export my posts on other people’s network page?
- Should I be able to export posts left for me by others? What amount of information should a friend be able to take about me when they leave a network, if any?
Additional commentary on the topic I notice from Mike Arrington and Nick Carr.
Then it probably is a monkey.
Sharing is sharing, and the only thing that will stop me sharing your contact information with anyone i want is my local laws (or fear of falling foul of them), my sense of ethics, or a technical restriction.
If you don’t want it out there you shouldn’t be broadcasting it. Sadly for the everyday user this situation is less than acceptable, but thats the way it is.
The real question, is how do we swing the balance back towards the consumer…
If you download my data and put it into your own outlook or cell phone, I don’t care. But if you put it into a contact sharing system, like Plaxo, (and why oh why Plaxo, Allen not sure if it was you who called them a silicon valley darling but they have a big “hate” following), then it’s a different story.
Plaxo took a lot of flak a few years back about this database goldmine of contacts they amassed from downloading and comparing user’s email contact lists.
nope – never called them a darling
trust me, i know who the darlings are :)
Those are some interesting questions that you propose and I’m sure everyone differs on their opinion, but I think if you put it online then it’s there for the taking (I’m talking about personal info, not copyrighted material). It’s interesting how a decade ago most of us were so concerned about privacy (and some of us still are), but it’s fascinating how so many people are just putting it all out there on social networks with no regard to privacy and they love being transparent for the whole world to see. If you don’t want others to have something on or about you then don’t post it online because it could end up in a place that you never intended it to be such as the case with Benazir Bhutto’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto. A screenshot of his Facebook profile ended up on Radar’s site: Bhutto Boy Shows Buffy Facebook Love.
And on Scoble, I think he had every right to take it. When you post something on your profile, it’s public. That’s my two-cents!
As for as social networks go, if you can get your hands on it, it’s yours.
Social networks are not private, in fact if they were, there’d be not point becuase others could see your data.
By sharing your name, DOB, interests, comments, ect. you are sharing them!
If you don’t want your info shared, don’t enter it on a social network.
Greg
So I share my contact data with a friend on Facebook. Would that give him the right to turn around and sell that information to a spammer? And if he did, could he just turn around to me and say “What? You gave it to me to do with as I pleased!”
Of course not.
If I put my email address in public on my web site, there’s no trust relationship. I expect people to use it, for fair means and foul, and my spam filters have to do the dirty work of sorting between the two.
On a social network, on the other hand, I’m not giving away: I’m sharing, with “friends”. When you give your data to someone else, there’s a trust relationship between the two of you which limits what can be done with them.
The question is: is what Robert did a violation of the trust relationship between him and his “friends”?
What about the import/export of contact lists?
I think many of us have been doing that for some time now (LinkedIn, 30boxes, etc) without a thought about it …
Or maybe we’ve thought and clicked anyway?
We all have an adress book – digital or analog -, where we collect information for our friends (birtday, mail, mobile phone, business phone, etc). Scoble just used a software for it. Marshall Kirkpatrick had a post yesterday about exactly this topic.
Mhh… Scoble is following me on twitter – I hope he will not sell my personal things. But wait, when you use a social network you never know what your real friends are. I am definitly not that open to social networks – sadly there is a big security issue.
Perhaps the answer to identity theft problems is available through the dual-interaction encryption technology wherein the sender’s message is encoded and only the intended, verified recipient receives the decryption code.
Only the recipient’s DNS address contains the ability to decrypt because only that unique address has that unique decryption 128 bit code, un duplicable in 10,000 years with a million computers.
Speaking of which, why don’t we get a unique DNS for our birth certificate, only usable by us, only usable in our systems, always unique and encrypted every time we use it, for anything? Social Security numbers then become what they were intended, an account information storage identifier, for information related to taxes and government benefits, nothing else, no other use possible or intended.
Some additional benefits of a Birth DNS are it’s unique ability to be you under any and all circumstances; a permanent way of creating an address with which to communicate, visually, verbally, in text, and any other way. Since our modern society is headed this way, we should undertake this project ASAP.
Consider this: if we can somehow translate our DNA “code” into a unique DNS identifier at birth, we would own something that no one could ever steal or duplicate.
Isn’t the building of community really the reduction of privacy and privatism? If so, shouldn’t we accept that if she share our data in a community, it will be available to the world at large?