Have the Data Wars Begun
Robert Scoble reports that Facebook has kicked him off their site, citing that it appears he was running a script. In their letter, Facebook says,
In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.
I’d just read the article in Wired about scraping, and the ways companies were building businesses around taking data from a service and building a product around it. This is something I haven’t fully formed an opinion on, because it just seems so fragile. If the “mother ship” company scuttles your effort, you’re out of luck pretty quickly.
But What About PERSONAL Use of Your Own Data?
Here’s where I think Scoble’s efforts were. I don’t think he was out trying to build a startup out of the data he surfed. My guess, by the text of his post (he mentions he’ll update us later), was that he was using someone’s tool, probably something someone pitched him as something cool. In my mind, maybe he was trying to spring his data free, maybe even just to see if it could be done. (Total speculation, and not especially important to my post overall).
Robert points us to DataPortability.org, and it’s a pretty interesting bit of info. (One note: the “calls to action” on the site are fairly muddied in the design. I wanted to get involved, but the most prominent thing I saw was a button I could add to my blog). It’s a site that seeks to standardize data portability. Boy, I can say amen to that.
But where will the lines go? Where will we be able to move OUR stuff, but not take a company’s metadata with us? Where are the lines between the value we’ve added to a site by tagging a photo, or contributing in some other social computing way, and how will companies communicate that difference to us? Meaning, are our TAGS in flickr OUR data or FLICKR’s data?
Maybe The Data Wars Have Begun
Perhaps it’s now a time where we, the users of social networks, will start thinking of our data as a source of value, and perhaps we’ll have to better understand the social contracts between what we’re using on these sites and what these sites are using from us. The more we give away, the less value it will have ultimately for our own use, and yet, there’s a trade that has to happen, lest everything we like about the Internet (free, fluid, fast) suddenly become a losing proposition for these organizations, who mostly are using our data for educating advertisers.
I’m not sure my take on this, but wanted to bring it to you for consideration. On one side, I want to be able to move my personal data from site to site, because if I spent the effort building it in there, I want to get it back out. On another side, is the friending process of Facebook THEIR data or is it mine? My friends, yes, but is the link and the semantic data built between us something that Facebook owns?
What’s your take?
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Comments
Data standards across multiple platforms would be great, but it’s not going to happen for a while. Facebook and others like the barriers to exit that exist when you can’t walk w/ your info. I think OpenID and data portability will be achieved, but probably not in 08. Each site/platform has unique db requirements and systems…imagine how difficult it would be to get everyone to standardize across the board!
There needs to be a standard whether it’s OpenID or something else, but a standard way of storing our personal data for use in such sites.
Scoble’s scraping of FB to make a backup of his data (and that of his contacts) for his own personal use shouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately, too many sites such as Facebook want a lock on everything posted to their site. They haven’t figured out yet that it’s the people who use their site (and other like it) who can make or break them in the end.
Flickr went through a similar thing a year or so ago when they announced that as they’d been bought by Yahoo, Flickr users needed a Yahoo account to access their own photos. Photos were being used by Yahoo on their own sites without permission of the owners. Flickr/Yahoo claimed that by posting photos onto Flickr, even on a paid premium account, they had ownership of the photos. Lots of hollering. A bunch of people noisily left Flickr. In the end though… not much changed.
I pointed out in the comments on Scoble’s post that maybe it’s the METHOD that was used. Maybe the script was too hot for the servers. I could see that being an issue, for certain.
Meaning, getting his data isn’t bad. Getting it in a way that rips it open might be.
One one hand it is no secret that Facebook has been pissing off its user base for months, I too had my account “deactivated for violation of terms of use” for a few weeks, however they created the site and set up how they want people to use it - so where does their rights come into play?
Scoble has thousands of people on his list, I’m getting up there as well and it does scare me if one day Facebook decides to change their business model and all that data which I have created and worked to building is gone.
I think the end result of this is that lawyers for social networks will have to alter the terms of use and allow for users to take data off the site.
I blogged about this, in a wider context than just textual data (it’s far scarier when you think of the potential of shared GENETIC data, and that’s already in the works!)
http://moneypowerwisdom.com/the-social-gene-pool-whose-data-is-it-anyway/
All success
Dr.Mani
Good article, thought provoking. I guess it pulls us painfully back to the adage of commerce, “Theres no such thing as a free lunch”. Its made me want to think about this some more, perhaps to put a presentation together about the skirmishes, the ambushes and the toe to toe fire fights of the Data Wars.
Writers entering the blogosphere are tussling with the same issue from both a legal and a moral point of view.
Morally speaking, anything that anyone creates is implicitly owned by them—and then you can start parsing the issues based on public domain, and other criteria variously dealt with by Creative Commons.
Technically speaking, that is from a nuts and bolts POV, agreeing to the TOS of pretty much any socnet site is going to surrender ownership of that particular data to the site owner. This is not to say that you’ve surrendered the content, just that SPECIFIC version of it.
That you own your data is for me a no brainer. The way you connnect to others is quite tricky. You are connecting to their data and how much can you take with you if you are moving your stuff.
Eventually we shouldn’t be moving. We have our dat and we connect it with apps / services and if we choose we can disconnect again. And these services like facebook should comply to our TOC.
Thanks Robert for doing whatever you did. It gets the discussion going.
@Merlene - how can the Flickr own copyrighted material? Maybe they can use it, but own it?
Chris are my comments on your blog still mine and how can i retrieve it?
And can I take the article and all the other comments as well?
Otherwise it’s all out of context.
I think your first-blush Tweet:
“Dear Facebook: good thinking! Piss off you most influential fan (@scobleizer). Good PR idea!”
Was more right.
I LOVE what Swisher wrote on this: http://is.gd/r2
“But Facebook’s disabling of his account yesterday–because he was apparently using a script to access and pull data from his own profile there to move it to other social graphs of his choice–is not going to turn out well for the social networking company.”
“…And–let’s be honest–Facebook certainly doesn’t have any bullet-free feet to aim at”
ev & biz are organic gardeners. they have a flourishing ecosystem.
FB thinks it can nuke its fields with pesticides at the site of a bug.
i’d imagine he *was* going about the right thing the (maybe even slightly devious: “will i get caught?”) wrong way. but it’s still the right thing.
Swisher nailed it when she pointed out it’s almost as if he went after their Achilles heel on purpose. even if he didn’t mean to, defacto, he did it.
and guess who looks bad cuz of it? (hint: does not have the initials RS)
i’m really seeing this as a little civil disobedience to call them out an make a point. even if he didn’t set out to make it that, there’s value in that as a back story.
@erik - Interesting question. My blog is licensed as Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution / Non Commercial / Share Alike, so I imagine that all content that I put on here would be similarly licensed. But even THAT gets into a weird question.
If I post a YouTube video on here, and that video is okay to share in some contexts, does it somehow take on the properties of the rights I describe in MY Creative Commons license? Hmm… Where’s Colette Vogel?
This is why I ‘printscreen’ everything I do in Facebook…
More on the serious side, I think this will become more of an issue in ‘08.
For some reason I’m bothered by Scoble running scripts on his friends, and am glad Facebook stopped him. The method on how they stopped him, maybe wasn’t the best approach, though, and is classic Facebook Customer Service with a Smile. I do applaud his efforts to try and crack the data portability issue, if that is indeed his intent, but I can’t fault Facebook too much. You break the rules, they pretty much do what they want. Are we really that surprised? Is it because this is Scoble he should be treated any different?
Are we speculating he was using something like FacebookSync to copy down his contacts? With as many friends as he has on facebook I could see this running hitting the server a bit hard.
I think this whole issue is ridiculous! But it’s a sign of how we as citizens allow governments and corporations to bully us. My mind’s data is my data. Information about any relationships I’ve formed is entirely my own, regardless of what tools I’ve used to achieve those. I’d like to continue this rant, but I think I’ll blog about it on my own site.
Excellent post, Chris! Stay strong Robert!
Power to the People! ;-)
Hi — lots of converging thoughts on this episode…
Facebook is following a pretty standard online strategy. The investment you put into making their service useful keeps you ‘entangled’ with their service. The effort in switching to a new service is too large to be worthwhile. It’s like online banking — once you have all your accounts set up and accessible from one place, why bother opening a new account at a rival bank?
So I’m not shocked that Facebook (or Flickr, etc) are taking this approach, but it doesn’t mean we need to just accept it. Maybe this incident will give people pause about just jumping in to the next online community.
I hadn’t heard of dataportability.org until Scoble’s post this morning, but I’ve been starting to follow Doc Searl’s VRM work. I’m used to using the term Vendor Relationship Management in a different context but it’s all about people taking control of their own data and their relationship with companies, which is a good thing.
As an aside, maybe we need a standard “Terms of Service in Plain English.” Most people never read the TOS and perhaps they are complex on purpose so that they *don’t* get read.
Mark
Link to Project VRM: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
So Facebook is supposed to differentiate between Scoble scraping his profile using a script that is against the terms of service versus someone running a script for malicious purposes?
Facebook, MySpace and other social networking platforms are free service that allow you to connect to people, promote, discover new things you like, and find people with like interests. You are are going onto THEIR site, it isn’t your site. The data that you provide, the contacts you make, are all housed on THEIR site. You run the risk of losing this data and having the data used for other purposes by signing up for THEIR site.
This social media movement where people complain that it is unfair or that your data is so valuable and they wouldn’t have a site without it is so flawed. If you want the ability to connect, if you want to use their services, if you want to make a name for yourself on their networks abide by their terms of service and understand that you are just a number in their system.
Really it isn’t that hard.
First impression: Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Actually, the discussion of data ownership has been popping up on utterz lately.
Some of us want to be able to download and save at least a copy of whatever content we share on services like utterz which includes audio and video clips along with photo’s and text.
Obviously, we already have the media that we upload and share online, but not the audio recordings which is the point of contention for many who would like to be able to have that audio file for their podcasts or other reasons.
Yes, there are recorders that can capture any streaming media, but they can be expensive and perhaps too much trouble for the average user.
There should be a simple Save As…or Download button on any media we create for services. After all, we are the authors of the material. Shouldn’t we at least have the option to save a copy of OUR data?
Pai
Couple of thoughts:
1) It’s not like Facebook has suddenly changed the rules or some data policy. They’ve always been an information roach motel - this is nothing new. To now decide you don’t like the TOS is fine but you can’t slam the company because you no longer agree with their rules.
2) Yes Scoble’s intended use was personal/not spammy but how is Facebook supposed to be able tell the difference??? At the end of the day Scoble tripped a system that was designed to PROTECT the user data from unwanted uses. If he’d scraped everything he could have easily posted “I just swiped all your data from Facebook & they did nothing”… and we’d all be off down a different privacy shit storm direction…
This is one of those cases where a company had a pretty clear TOS and they’re well within their rights to invoke the “if you don’t like it, leave” clause.
@Kevin- I agree. I think it’s asking a lot for a system to differentiate between malice and well-meaning. Intent isn’t part of a server farm’s operational rulesets.
I think this is a moment, however, where people will consider HOW they use these systems, what they’re using them for, and which systems make it easier or harder to extract the value and effort put into them.
Don’t forget that LinkedIN allows you to port your contacts out of there lickity split easy. Why? Because LinkedIN knows the value is on-platform, and if you want to take your ball and go home, you’ll only have a point in time capture of your information, and not nearly as much of the value.
Up until this moment, I bet you most folks haven’t been particularly aware of what rights a social network has, what legal definitions they’ve put in place, and what matters to themselves as a user on these systems.
Personally, everything I put into Facebook, I consider theirs. I’m in their backyard. I’m adding to their value. And I get something back insofar as it’s a directory where people can find me, and where my blog is reposted and spread to different users. If Facebook wants to own their instance of my text, that’s one thing. If they intend to write books off it, and whatever, then we might have to talk about that.
And then here’s something: what about the 3rd party apps I use to get my blog posted on my Facebook page. They are getting a copy of my posts, too. Do THEY think they own my blog posts, too? Not sure I’ve ever read a 3rd party app’s TOS.
@mark
as a child I wanted to redraw the money I saved up as a kid and I had to pay a big sum of money to get my money. I felt cheated then and still do. They made money with my money already. I never banked with that bank again.
@kevin
It’s a free service, but they are a company with aim to make money. And they do not by the service itself but by the people that use it. You should untangle the system from the data.
They make money the moment you start using it. You get a warm welcome why not a warm goodbye like “visit us again sometime!” Off course you can take the clothes with you you had on when you came in! (but all you talked about and made here are ours now).
Just after posting a lil blog snippet about this topic in my very obtuse fashion “2008 - The year of the “Long Tail”?” http://jeanricard.tumblr.com/.
I caught you & Scoble on Twitter and just followed your tinyurl here. I read your post and it hits the mark. Oh well. I guess I can’t call it a right prediction if it starts to come true within 10 minutes, probably even before I made it. ~LOL~
Erik- Yeah but Erik how many people actually CARE about the data? This is what drives me nuts about reading tech blogs, tech users and people that actually understand how their data is used on social networking websites talk about the conversation, the value, and numerous other concepts. But to the 99.5% of other users of these social networks they don’t care.
They are going to make money from these numerous other users. The social web geeks of the world make up a small fraction of the users, when we talk about these sites that so often gets lost when we get on our high horses.
Chris- “I think this is a moment, however, where people will consider HOW they use these systems, what they’re using them for, and which systems make it easier or harder to extract the value and effort put into them.”
What people Chris, a few thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand? What does that matter?
As someone who has left FaceBook, I can attest to the “warm goodbye”… Removing myself from FaceBook was an interesting exercise in seeing how many pages had default-checked boxes that allowed my information to remain active in certain circumstances.
I think I found them all, but with a semi-final wave, they were waiting with my email address on the home page to re-sign me up if I ever want to reconsider my silly decision to break free of them.
Well, almost break free of them. Some may find this warm and friendly; I find it just plain creepy.
Be still my heart ! I stated a few months ago give a kid 200 million dollars he shall soil his diapers ! I also stated Facebook in the end will go the way of the EDSEL! I Face book generates ad revenue by increasing the amount of participants on the site ! Screwing with the Scobies of the world is adding the final paint job to the Edsel!
Facebook is a kid’s game run by kids, they are not seasoned professionals ! I enter most of my data on Stumble Upon,Mahalo,
Lijit.Ma.nolia,Mixx.Connotea, Reddit, Technorati,et al Honestly I only used Facebook to pimp posts on my blog by others ! I don’t see any content on f-book worth lifting ! Facebook and their Legal Eagles just may have them sleeping outside !
Oh I very much sympathize with Scoble on this one. Stuff like this makes it much less fun to keep you data in the cloud.
Facebook disabled our non-profit’s account a month or so ago. We made the call early to sign up as a person and not as a group. Why? Basically because FB is really fricking clunky for non-profits. If you want to friend your newsletter suscribers en masse, then someone from our org has to friend them all first. It makes it really hard to differentiate your personal life from your work life.
Anyhoo, they let us know that this was a no-no and then cut us off without giving us the chance to inform all AIDG’s current friends to follow our group, etc. Admittedly their support staff was really nice about the fact that they were giving us the axe, but it was a major headache coming as it did right b4 our Xmas push.
They didn’t have a way to export that info to help us out so we’re trying to refind friends. Grrr arrgggh.
@Kevin - It’s not a numbers thing right off, and Facebook won’t crumble, and I don’t want anyone to crumble. But will people think about how they use these services? Yes. How many? Beats me.
I read the comments on here and see some people that Facebook deleting Scoble is like a death blow. Come on…
I just feel that a big deal is being made over something really small. He violated the TOS, he got deleted. Trying to turn him into a martyr (I am not saying you are doing this but I have seen this today)for user data is a tad much.
[...] Chris Brogan makes the key point that this might be the beginning of the "Data Wars": Maybe The Data Wars Have Begun [...]
[...] his blog today, Chris Brogan sums up the confusion between who owns what as: I’m not sure my take on this, but wanted to bring it to you for [...]
I have read all the comments with great interest ! If a firm has to hide behind a legal department to maintain their market ,something has to be wrong ! When you take large investor fund’s
you can’t confuse effort with results ! Investor funds exist for profit they have no heart ! Scobie touched a nerve! Delisting a client is is a cover up to protect possibly another problem !
don’t tase(r) me bro!
it seemed like an extreme response
but when you look at the rules
it was perfectly laid out
and followed up accordingly
when the taser boy got tased people rallied
freedom of speech etc they said
when really the two weren’t related at all
you don’t have freedom of speech across the board
nor do you own your data across the board
the boy got tased because he would not step down when told to do so
he broke the rules
Scoble got booted because *he* broke the rules
that’s my thoughts on it right now
they change hourly :)
Who chooses the news?…
In the last few days, I’ve read two interesting articles about news and its audience. In very different ways, the articles look at how traditional media favor the predictable stories. Today, as I watched the Scoble/Facebook/Plaxo mini-maelstrom spin u…
[...] that he should be able to do what he wants with his data. After reading a few posts I came across Chris Brogan’s Blog and my head exploded, it was nasty, my friend Shawn who shares a cubicle with me said it reminded [...]
This is out of hand a bit. I take a different route on this. I think Scoble is akin to a modern day data slave trader.
My take at
reachingforlucidity.net
Too much to type, my vid says what I have to say.
Chris, just read this post. Flickr tags are our data. I don’t need flickr to add tags to photograph. For example, there is a software called xnview which I can use to tag photos and then upload to Flickr with the same tag. Tags are like exif data in some sense. They are part of photograph and not of service.
[...] search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing [...]
[...] your data: So, whatever side of the debate you find yourself falling on, remember this. If the data wars truly have begun, victory won’t come in the form of an “open” Facebook; it will come from a new [...]
[...] portability and privacy, if not directly in conflict, apply pressure in two different directions. Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, and many, many others have touched on the subject. In Brogan’s case, and in [...]
[...] and choices. Robert Scoble’s data was erased completely from Facebook sparking the “data wars,” have you tried to erase yourself from these sites? You may be surprised to learn that [...]
[...] search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing [...]
[...] search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing [...]
I wonder what the incentives are for companies to put effort (create export tools etc) into having their customers move to competitors…
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Yeah, just for my own use, not for sending spam or anything like that.