The non-portability of datapolitics

Thursday, March 27. 2008

The non-portability of datapolitics

Robert Scoble on Dataportability, being fed a hook, line and sinker from Facebook:

So, what’s the problem, beyond the politics of some of this stuff (will Facebook join the Dataportability.org? Who cares? Has the Dataportability.org actually shipped anything yet beyond PR?)

WHAT IS THE HOLDUP?

It’s not easy to do any of this stuff. On Saturday I talked with Dave Morin, head of Facebook’s application platform.

He brought up use case after use case that I hadn’t really thought through.

For instance, what if a user wants to delete his or her info off of Facebook. Today that’s possible. But what about in a really data portable world? After all, in such a world Facebook might have sprayed your email and other data to other social networks. What if those other social networks don’t want to delete your data after you asked Facebook to?

Well, for a starters the UK had to threaten Facebook re the im-possibility of deleting data off Facebook. But the rest of the story is more a lesson in Facebook et al not wanting to let go of the Social Graph, as that is their main value proposition.

Its very simple conceptually - just let the user own their own Social Graph, in some open format, with API's and sufficient control of intimacy layers, and they take the risks. Its also non-trivial, but very do-able - we've done the conceptual architecture (we did one 2 years ago) and I know others have too - as one of the commentators, Tom Morris notes:

Dave Morin sounds like he’s spreading FUD. There are existing implementations - like the ability to import your contacts into Dopplr from Twitter and from any page with hCards. That works fine, and nobody is bitching about the privacy concerns of this.

A lot of people are bringing up “policy” reasons why this kind of thing can’t happen. The fact is that they are already happening. I’m sceptical that it’ll be groups like DataPortability.org that’ll push this - it’s more likely it’ll be hackers working together in an ad-hoc way will solve the problems. Then the vendors will jump in front of the parade and start preaching openness when it becomes inevitable.

Couldn't have said it better......

Update - there is clearly a Zeitgeist at work here - at about the same time I wrote this, Chris Pirillo launched a very ambitious plan for people to collaborate to write a simple social front-end based on Drupal. (Cough! Drupal? I hear those of you who have wrestled with it ask....

Posted by Alan Patrick in Dis - Aggregation at 11:24 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Any idea if there are any moves afoot to set up creative commons license-like standard privacy policies? I'd like to see sites display a CC-like badge detailing what is portable from their site, and what is not.

Generally I'd like my portable data not to be copied permanently from the source (i.e. accessed remotely, through an API, each time the recipient site needs it). The fewer places my data actually resides, the easier it is to delete it/restrict access to it. It's a similar distinction to that between shortcuts and files on your desktop. Perhaps, in fact the file/shortcut framework should further shape privacy handling over the next decade; it's a concept everyday people will understand (sites telling users 'We will COPY your data from Facebook' rather than 'Create shortcuts on this site to your Facebook data')

I understand it's probably easier for Dapper coders to copy the contact info into their own databases and build Dapper user profiles from that, than have a dynamic system in which a Dapper profile ceases to exist when you delete/restrict that piece of info on Facebook. But I still think it's an approach users should be requesting.

Even though my data's on the Internet, it's not 'in the cloud' until it's at a single source and is just referenced/accessed from other locations - my multiple devices, and the multiple services I sign up to.

#1 Phil Bradley (Homepage) on 2008-03-27 12:04 (Reply)

I don't know about zeitgeist - I'm not even sure I can spell it

- but I've been wittering about this too.
http://shaidorsai.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/data-portability-data-ownership/
I reckon one source, cc style authority to use is the way forward...

#1.1 Steve Ellwood (Homepage) on 2008-03-27 16:37 (Reply)

Phil - ther's clearly a zeitgeist here - see my update re a Drupal based OS front end

#2 Anonymous on 2008-03-27 12:25 (Reply)

I'd be able to if you weren't so damn private!

#3 Phil Bradley (Homepage) on 2008-03-27 12:27 (Reply)

I see. That was Alan, referring up to his post, which has been edited. Duh!

#3.1 Phil Bradley (Homepage) on 2008-03-27 17:07 (Reply)

@ Phil - yes, sorry - forgot to log in my name - admin privileges and all that

#4 Anonymous on 2008-03-28 08:03 (Reply)

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