January 3rd, 2008
Facebook to Scoble: all your data belong to us.
Intentionally or unintentionally, celebrity blogger Robert Scoble has put himself right at the center of the data portability issue, and at the same time is helping to expose the fascicle nature of Facebook’s claims of openness.
Scoble is one of Facebook’s most heavy users, both in terms of the number of “friends” he has connected with and the extent to which he utilizes and promotes the platform. I’d even go as far as to call him a Facebook fan boy. At the same time, he’s expressed frustration at the limits Facebook places on a user’s account, such as restricting the number of “friends” any one user can add. Scoble is also somebody who likes to push and experiment with any new web service. Putting these two facts together, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that he’s been running a third-party script in order to scrape Facebook so that he can move his social graph data to other social networks — doing so against Facebook’s terms and conditions. The result: his account has been suspended. All completely predictable but useful nonetheless.
Data portability is back on the agenda (see my previous post ‘Do ordinary users care about data portability? And if not, should they? Four social networks respond.‘)
Or as Mathew Ingram puts it: whose data is it anyway?
The big question here — which the Scobleizer has cleverly put himself at the centre of — is: Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?
As Marc Canter, Marshall Kirpratrick and many others (including myself) have been arguing for years: it’s our data and we should get to decide what to do with it. However, the resistence of Facebook, MySpace, Google and most of the leading players in the user data space to offer easy data portability (I can’t even backup my gmail with a simple one-click) is based on an old fashioned notion that lock-in is the best way to protect a strong market position. By putting data portability back on the agenda, let’s hope that’s soon to change.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
