Roger Benningfield left a very articulate comment on my last post, pointing out to me that the Facebook privacy shroud is as much about you moving your friends around then others getting access to your own profile data.

I totally agree.  Perhaps Roger probably hasn’t heard my rap on ‘opting in’ as an important ingredient to making moving ones’ social data around’ and ‘owning’ that social graph.  So here it is again.

First off - Roger’s comment:

“I resent Facebook execs continuing to hide behind the shroud of privacy to some how ‘protect me’ from who - myself?”

Marc: It isn’t about protecting you from yourself. It’s about protecting everyone on your friends list from you. If I agree to declare myself your friend on Facebook, that in no way implies that I’ve agreed to be your friend on Myspace, LinkedIn, or some random PeopleAggregator-powered site.

So even in a best-case (for you) scenario, FB can only open things up to the extent that they allow individual users to say, “yeah, Marc can take my unique identifier with him”. And the number of people who would bother to check that box in their settings is probably somewhere between zero and Scoble. There’s no benefit to *me* in letting you drag my Facebook persona around with you, after all.

In all this talk of social silos, folks keep mentioning “my data”. But ultimately, “my data” in Facebook is pretty sparse. The important stuff is actually “our data”, and I have no business unilaterally deciding to take it elsewhere.

OK - so as I stated above - I am 1 trillion percent in agreement with Roger - but I believe there’s a solution here.  Checking a box ‘opting in’ to allow folks to export and move you and your email around - is the ONLY way to solve the issue Roger brings up.  It may take time to take hold, but I don’t see any other good resolution to this issue.

1)  This issue has actually been bubbling up and getting ready to explode for years.  We ran into it with the FOAFnet effort and no one has come up with a solution for it - mainly because the practical reality was that exporting one’s social graph with unique identifiers was a pipe dream and not a reality - yet.

2) But here we are - we’ve got OpenSocial, OpenID, David Recordan and Brad Fitzpatrick running around and all sorts of Social Networking and blogging companies - jumping on the band wagon.  So I would submit that NOW is the time to instigate ‘opt-in’ check-boxes as a core part of one’s profile settings.

3)  The issue of ownership is complicated.  Mary Hodder (of dabble) has changed her company’s EULA and TOS.  They concede that the end-user owns and will continue to own any and all data collected by dabble “on her behalf”.  All the EULA does is ask for a non-exclusive, free license to use that data - in exchange for using the dabble service.  That’s brilliant - as it solves the issue of who owns what.  But the social graph of my relationships which I’ve collected on Facebook.  Who owns that?  I can see Facebook doing the same thing Mary did - and ask (demand) for a non-exclusive right to use that data - for free.  And it looks like they (Facebook) will need that control for controling access to their new ‘behavior APIs’ (or whatever they call it.)  But what about a friend of mine who has my email?  Do they own that or have the right to move it to another system?

4) Hmmmmm - well what I say is. No. Not unless I’ve opted in and given them permission to do that.  I can imagine all sorts of opt-in controls that will extend the UI beyond just one checkbox - to providing a unique checkbox to every relationship (sort of like how Facebook offers only ‘partial’ access to my profile right now.)  If we can provide opt-in controls across your entire account, we can certainly offer opt-in controls on an individual by individual basis.

Anyway - great statement Roger!  Thanks for making it and pointing out what a true nerd Robert Scoble is.   I agree - he is.

And I agree with you - lets just try and get folks to include opt-in controls - from now on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.