2008-01-09

Who Owns Your Social Data? You Do, Sort of

Another post from Slashdot on 2008.01.04 questions just how much of our information online is actually ours to do with as we like...
Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble? 'The idea for people to move their social graph from one service to other is a fabulous benefit,' Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales told eWEEK. 'To me, it's a benefit to customers. People should be very wary about services that are uptight about that kind of thing in an effort to lock you out of the customer.' The problem is that while the profile data may be yours and yours alone, your address book contains the names and e-mail addresses of your friends, family and business contacts. So who owns the data?

Robert Scoble was booted off of Facebook and lost all his profile info (including over 5000 friends) for alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse. According to Robert:
It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer... it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in its database.

For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo.


Apparently he was just trying to sync up his Facebook contacts who were in Plaxo into his Outlook address book. But, as it went against the TOS, he got the boot.

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