Facebook – Scoble Fiasco Series: Data ownership

This is the first post in the Facebook-Scoble Fiasco Series. I want to use this incident to raise the awareness of the users of social networks. This incident brought into focus many claims and counterclaims. Some of them are valid and the rest are plain bullshit. I hope this series helps people make a distinction between what is correct and what is incorrect. This post is not about whether Scoble is right or wrong. It is about things we should be worried before jumping into the social networking bandwagon.

The most important aspect is the data ownership. There are many people who are pounding on this topic ever since the word social networks became part of the tech vocabulary. We upload quite a bit of our data into the social networking services, in the form of personal information, social graph (if thatz the term people want to use), audio, videos, photos, etc. Now the question of ownership of such data comes into picture. I upload my information into facebook. I spend quite a lot of time adding friends into my facebook account and interact with them. They are all fruits of my labor. Facebook just offers me a platform to network with my friends and they make money in the form of advertisement directed towards me and my friends. The more friends I bring to facebook the more value is added to their service (Network Effect). The role of facebook (or any other social networking site for that matter) ends at this stage. The only other role I could visualize for them is to ensure that no law is broken inside their platform. Everything else is at my discretion and responsibility. I decide who becomes my friend and I decide who can see what information about me. Facebook plays no role in this decision except offering granular privacy feature in their platform. Facebook doesn’t tell me that I can only be friends with X or Y. They also don’t tell me what I can show to A or B or C. Every other action of mine inside the facebook platform is done at my discretion, without the influence of facebook. The data generated by my actions are my own data and no one else can claim ownership to this data. Facebook or any other social networking service cannot tell me that I cannot take this data, which was generated by me, to any other service.

I can quote a real world analogy here. Suppose if you go to a bar regularly and socialize and let us say you have aggregated a group of people who eventually turn into your friends. Letz say you are bored with the bar you frequent or you had a bad experience with that bar. You now want to move to a new bar. You want to invite your friends to come over to the new bar. Now, if the manager of the old bar says that you cannot take your friends to the new bar and if he argues that you can’t even remember the name or phone number or any other personal information of your friends, outside his bar, would you agree with the manager of the old bar? Don’t you think it is highly ridiculous? Don’t you think your relationship with your friends in the old bar is your personal matter and the old bar is just a place where you socialized with them? If you said no to the first question and yes to the next two questions, you are well aware of what is right and what is wrong. All you have to do is to apply the same kinda thinking to facebook or other social networking systems.

Like the old bar, facebook is just a place where you meet with your friends. Like how you have every right to take your friends to a new bar and how you can remember the information about your friends outside of your old bar, you should be able to take your friends to any social networking service you want and you should be able to carry the information about your friends to any social networking sites you want because it is you who own your information and your friend’s information. Facebook or any other social networking service has no right to take ownership of your data. Every social networking user should be able to understand the ownership of the data they generate inside the social networking service and make claims their data when some service tries to hold the data to a ransom. Even though I have used facebook in my discussion above, it applies to all the social networking services. If at all anyone can ever stop you from taking friend’s information, it should be that friend in question and not the social networking service. It is very important that the users of social networking services have a clear understanding about the ownership of data. The users of social networking sites only allow the sites to mine their data and build a business model out of it either using advertising or any other approach. They don’t transfer the ownership of data to the social networking site. It is like renting out your house to someone to live. The tenant cannot take ownership of the house. In the Libertarian speak (disclaimer: I am not a Libertarian and I am just borrowing the term from them), data ownership is similar to property ownership. Understanding this is very crucial to long term security of your identity and data. Imagine if Microsoft told you that every document you create with Microsoft word is theirs, would you accept it? (well, in a way, they tried to tell that but lost it). It is the same case with your data in social networks. Please think carefully about this issue before you jump inside any social network.