The Data Portability Shuck

Can we start with the premise that Scoble’s recent problems with the Facebook “customer corral” were all about him and have little to do with “data portability?” When Plaxo asked him if they could experiment with screen scraping his 5,000 friends’ email addresses, grabbing the Facebook image of each email address and then translating it via OCR into an email record in a file they were building, he should have said “no,” and respected the terms of service that attempt to protect all Facebook customers. Instead he approved the Plaxo work and his account essentially became test data for that company, Facebook’s competitor. So if you were a friend of Scoble on Facebook, the Facebook service wasn’t able to protect YOUR data from the Scoble/Plaxo partnership. It wasn’t Robert’s data to give away. It was your data.

Let’s think of Facebook customers as woolly little lambs, frolicking and playing, gamboling about the pasture without a care in the world. Let’s think about Plaxo as a slaughterhouse, open for business with a holding pen on the Facebook pasture and a ramp that leads out of that pen straight to the kill floor of the slaughterhouse. Now why would any happy little lamb want to ascend that ramp? Well, they wouldn’t, and in some real slaughterhouse scenarios, the way that the little lambies find their way to that fateful moment where their life’s blood is spilled in the gutter, their skin is stripped from them like a cheap suit, and their viscera are dumped into tubs is that they follow what is known in the industry as a Judas goat. So, if your email address was the lambchop is this movie, guess who was the Judas goat.

Regarding the “walled gardens,” the “customer corrals” of social networking — Michael Geist and Alec Saunders have laid the groundwork for an understanding of the issues as well as a foundation for policy development and interoperability design that should allow these vendors to share data while respecting customers’ rights. The thoughtful work they’ve done stands in contrast to the “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web,” a sloppy set of assertions relating to personal ownership of one’s “social graph” put forward by Scoble, Smarr (the Plaxo CTO), Canter, and Arrington.

Saunders “Privacy Manifesto” published this week at GigaOm speaks to an individual’s rights over his/her own information. If you follow the preceding link you will see an informative discussion of private, personal data in digestible blog format. Read it! Scoble’s and Plaxo’s actions filtered through this screen are simply unethical (see number four, below):

… principles that form a Privacy Manifesto for the Web 2.0 Era.

1. Every customer has the right to know what private information is being collected. That rules out any secret data collection schemes, as well as monitoring regimes that the customer hasn’t agreed to in advance. It also rules out any advertising scheme that relies on leaving cookies on a customer’s hard disk without the customer’s consent.
2. Every customer has the right to know the purpose for which the data is being collected, in advance. Corporations must spell out their intent, in advance, and not deviate from that intent. Reasonable limits must be imposed on the collection of personal information that are consistent with the purpose for which it is being collected. Furthermore, the common practice of inserting language into privacy policies stating that the terms may be modified without notice should be banned. If the corporation collecting data wishes to change its policy then it’s incumbent upon the corporation to obtain the consent of customers in advance.
3. Each customer owns his or her personal information. Corporations may not sell that information to others without the customer’s consent. Customers may ask, at any time, to review the personal information collected; to have the information corrected, if that information is in error; and to have the information removed from the corporation’s database.
4. Customers have a right to expect that those collecting their personal information will store it securely. Employees and other individuals who have access to that data must treat it with the same level of care as the organization collecting it is expected to.

Michael Geist frames the issue in terms of “interoperability,” not “data portability.” The latter is a subset of solutions that might help enable the former. Last August Geist said,

The interoperability issue is likely to become more prominent in the months ahead as hundreds of specialty social networking sites covering virtually every area of interest from dogs to cooking, jostle for new users. In fact, services such as Ning now enable anyone to create their own social network site.

The result is that Internet users are repeatedly required to re-enter their personal information for each new network they join and find that each network is effectively a “walled garden”, where the benefits of the network are artificially limited by the inability to link a friend in Facebook with one in MySpace.

He went on to point out that

… there is mounting interest in developing open standards for social networks that would facilitate greater interoperability. For example, the Liberty Alliance and Project Higgins are two privacy-focused identity management initiatives that claim to provide users with the ability to manage their personal information across social networks in a secure and trusted manner.

The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the Internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.

How much of my “social graph” should you have rights to import and use on Plaxo if we were “friends” on Facebook? Is all of this moot? Haven’t serious scientists and technologists such as Valdis Krebs answered these questions for the players already? Doesn’t everybody understand that the NSA and other agencies already have these relationships mapped? How annoyed should we really be when someone like Scoble wants to add our contact information to his Amway distributor lead list?

I think much of this was well summarized by Loren Feldman earlier this week:

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