A brouhaha involving the temporary shutdown of the Facebook account of popular tech blogger Robert Scoble sparked discussion recently of a new issue for 2008: data portability.
Scoble tried to export the names, email addresses and birthdays of his close to 5,000 "friends" on Facebook into a beta version of Plaxo (the address book updating service).
His Facebook account was shutdown but then quickly reinstated when, presumably, the Facebook folks realized how powerful he is in the blogosphere. (Scoble's blog is currently ranked #36 on Technorati - so Top 50 - out of over 100 million blogs.)
There is no privacy
Translated... there is no privacy. If you're using any kind of online service, your "data" -- your name, your username, your email address -- can, potentially, be passed around (scraped is the geek term) between these networks.
So if you're using gmail or yahoo mail or Flickr or Delicious or YouTube or belong to Facebook or LinkedIn or another of the popular social networks, you've given up complete control of your personal information. You don't, so to speak, "own" it anymore. Surprised?
But there is trust
Don't be. Just don't forget that your personal data may also include your photos and videos and your carefully assembled networks of contacts and their information. And if an online service decides you're persona non grata, your stuff / data / digital trail is gone. Erased (as Scoble put it).
I guess we all know this on some level. It's part of the bigger and more thorny issue of privacy. With so many of us living so much of our lives online we are trusting both that our "data" won't be misused and that it won't disappear.
Silly us. But what can we do? The utility of these online services outweighs their risks -- at least for most of us.
The issue of privacy is one I will be exploring in 2008. I'm fascinated by it. I've had my own hiccup with being more visible online than I'd like to be (and being judged and criticized by folks who don't know me). Not fun.
I wonder sometimes... if I decided to crawl into a closet and "disappear," would it be possible? While I love my life online -- and the wonderful interactions and discussions with smart and interesting people around the world -- I sometimes long for the old days of no computers, no social networks, no email, etc.
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Previous Comments
daniela barbosa said on January 8, 2008 at 01:20 AM
Glad to see you bring up this topic to your audience because i agree with you that it will be a big one in 2008 and beyond. As companies look to implement social features within their own products or their own social networks these are all items that will continue to be important.
The dataportability group’s mission is to work towards creating standards that developers, vendors and the users using those service can depend on- Corporations that want to play in the space should take note.
Looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts on the issue!
Ian Kemmish said on January 8, 2008 at 09:36 AM
Back in the bad old days of commercial timesharing, when people would have called this data integrity rather than data privacy, there was a saying “ownership of the disc bins is nine points of the law.”
That’s just one reason why commercial timesharing died out.
David said on February 11, 2008 at 11:01 AM
This issue kept coming up on SoftwareCEO.com. The vendor would think that the data was an exit barrier. This is what allows them to charge too much for their webservices.
Web services are supposed to be the ultimate expression of utility computing, as in gas, electric, and telephone utilities, as in commodities, as in cheap. But, not all web services are cheap.
Web developers need to realize that webservices mean late market, not all markets. In the late market sales and competition are price driven and success is cost-driven. There is a place for webservices in the evolution of a software vendor, but it isn’t in holding the customer’s data hostage.
Dave said on February 11, 2008 at 11:07 AM
I stumbled across a service that syndicated a widget-based service to enable IP phone from your website. The widget provider answered your phone and forwarded a message to you, so you could call back. Cool. But, they were also the front end of a lead generation company, aka, they sold your data to others, worse your customer’s data.
Many people know to use a throwdown email account, but a throwdown phone is a bit harder to realize. Direct mailers can tell when their list data was stollen. If you let a third-party capture customer data, you need a few fake customers where you end up getting the email, the phone calls, and the junk mail, so you can test the “privacy” of the arrangement. Testing will let you know you have a problem, but it isn’t a problem you can cure. Imagine telling your customers that their data has seeped out of your control.
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