Who do we belong to?
A few months ago I was working on a blog post about data security which I never got around to finishing. This issue with Robert Scoble rekindled that.
I’ll sum it up for those of you that don’t know: Robert was using a Facebook app to scrape data from Facebook so that he can use it in his own database. Apparently this is against the Facebook Terms of Service since Facebook doesn’t have an export system for your contacts. Worse, Facebook shows your friends’ email address as as unclickable image rather than a string of text you can copy and paste.
So Robert gets in trouble for using this Facebook app. He gets banned from Facebook and they reinstate him after a day.
In the wake of all this, I’ve listened to both sides of the conversation from people that agree with what Robert did and people that don’t, but a serious question rises from all of this: who owns us?
If I give my contact information to my friend Bill from college via Facebook, am I allowing him to only contact me through Facebook? That seems kind of silly, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve known the guy for almost 20 years. If I wanted his contact info without going through Facebook I could call him up. However, we did join up in Facebook and that’s where this little story makes a serious turn.
Let’s say I want to pull Bill’s info off of Facebook and into Outlook (or the Mac equivalent: Entourage). This way I can have it in my iPhone or Address Book. Who knows if Facebook will be down at a time when I need to contact someone, or if I’ll have web access to get the information I need. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that. I can’t even copy and paste his email address into Outlook because his email is displayed as an image.
So this brings up a few interesting points. First, it seems like Facebook wants a monopoly on your data. They don’t let you export it, and they ban you if they find you data scraping. Second, the inability to show people’s email address as text is a way to discourage people from copy and pasting that text into another app like Outlook, or another service like Gmail. They could claim that they’re preventing spam, but in the light of recent events, I’m not so sure. Spammers are a notorious bunch, they’ll use OCR to convert the image to text if they have to so I believe Facebook did this to prevent casual copying of the data. Under normal circumstances, you can’t get someone’s email address by default unless you added them as a friend anyway.
So after all that, who owns the data? If I give Bill the right to have my contact information, why is Facebook preventing him from copying it for his own use? If I write down Bill’s contact info or type it into Outlook manually, have I just broken Facebook’s Terms of Service? If I really wanted to argue the point, I could say that the data came onto my computer screen at home.
Personally, I think that any data I put on the net through any service for friends, family, and acquaintances, should be completely controlled by me if you subscribe to the notion that I put the data there for those people to have in the first place.
I also believe that this recent blunder by Facebook is opening the door for someone to create a better service. We’ll have to wait and see what it is. I just hope it has vowels in the name.
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