Who Owns Your Email Address?

For the last month or so, I've been pretty out of the loop in terms of news, both online and off.  I normally read a few hundred articles a day, but during this time I read maybe a dozen total.  The holidays just kept me pretty busy, and I didn't have much time to read my feeds.  That being said, I'm a little late to the party on this particular piece of info.  Robert Scoble decided to test out a utility from Plaxo that would basically screen scrape information from his Facebook friends list and put it in a Plaxo database.  If you're familiar with the Facebook ToS, you already know what happened next.  That's right, Scoble got his account taken away.  After raising a big fuss online for a few days, he eventually got his account back.  I was completely unaware of any of this until today.  Had I found out earlier, I probably wouldn't have waited so long to unfriend him on Facebook.  I try to limit myself to not friending the "celebrity" type people on there, but I did have him, Leo Laporte, and Amber MacArthur.  Now I just have the latter two.  I had contemplated removing him earlier, but decided against it, as it was fun to see his updates.  After this, though, he's off my list. 

That isn't really what I'm writing about, though, as who I have on my friends list doesn't really matter.  What I find interesting is the debate about owning your social graph, and an open system that you can move that information around freely.  I am a bit split on this.  First, I agree that if I want to use a certain system for all of my contact management, I should be able to conveniently get that data from one thing to another.  However, is that data really mine to do that with?  Do I own my friends' contact info?  If they upload their information into Facebook, that doesn't suddenly make it my information.  Their information is still their information.  Does that mean that I should somehow be restricted on how I store this?  No, not at all.  But don't confuse the fact that you can find my email with the notion that you own that piece of data.  On that note, you aren't restricted on where you can keep my info once you have it, but I still have a choice of where I put it.  Keeping my email in your Outlook address book and keeping my email in your Plaxo account are two very different things.  One is only an address book, the other is significantly more.  If I wanted my information in the Plaxo network, I would have put it there myself.  The same can be said for the concept of social networks.  I am a member of Facebook, and I put all my information in there with the intention of it only appearing in Facebook.  I don't want my information in some other social network.  If you want to use some new startup network as your social network of choice, go right ahead, just don't expect me to join you.  Furthermore, don't stick my information there either.  I want to put my information in a network and have it stay there.  Sure, there's nothing stopping you from writing all my info down and then re-typing it into so other system, but I'm working on the assumption that you will be reasonable enough to not go sticking it in every social network out there.

Remember the fiasco that was Quechup?  A new network came along, asked you to upload your friends' contact info, and them spammed them like crazy.  That's a bit how Plaxo used to be.  Once they had your info, it was spam central.  I would really rather not risk having this happen all the time.  I know that we should be embracing the freedom of data portability, but let's not forget that not all of us want our data to be portable.  Just because we put it in Facebook doesn't mean we want it outside of Facebook.  And like I said, I know that it can be done manually, but that manual effort is exactly enough to keep most people from bothering.  If it's so easy to do manually, why do people want portability?  I'm uploading info with the assumption that it'll stay where I put it. 

I don't think that I'm being too unreasonable here, but if you disagree, please let me know.  Dare seems to agree with me, so I know I'm not completely nuts.

They're After You

There has been some noise lately about Facebook's potential new ad service that could display ads targeted to you based on your Facebook information while you're on sites outside of Facebook.  The way it would work is that Facebook would stick a cookie on your machine and when an ad they sold sees you on another site, it knows that you're a fan of goth-punk gospel music.  This is, of course, causing all sorts of concern over privacy issues.  People seem to find it scary enough that Google shows you ads based on your search results, to think that they might see ads based on their Facebook profile is of great concern to them.  To me, this isn't a big deal.  There isn't some person somewhere sitting at a computer, pouring over Facebook profiles, and matching those people up to ads.  There is just some algorithm that sees I'm a fan of Sprite, and shows me an ad for Sprite instead of Coke.  Well, they would attempt to show me an ad, but I wouldn't see it.  That's not the point, though.  The point is that is there really a big difference between seeing an ad on Facebook that is targeted to you because of something you have in your profile, and seeing and ad on MSN targeted to you because of something you have in your profile?  The site you're visiting doesn't see this information.  They don't know what you have in your profile.  All of that information stays within the confines of Facebook's network.  When Facebook introduced the ability to target flyers using specifics in profiles, people said it was great, and wondered why it took so long to get here.  This is really the same concept, just showing it to you somewhere else.  Also, all of this is contingent on you having that cookie on your machine.  Lastly, there is the fact that if I see an ad telling me about something for 50-Cent, I really don't care, but if I saw an ad for something Sarah Brightman related, I'd be interested.  As a consumer, this would actually work in my favor. If I find the ads of interest, they no long are such an annoyance.  Instead of being considered ads, they move into that long sought by advertisers position of being "value-adds."

Perhaps I am too lenient about all of this.  What are your thoughts?

Oh, Snap, Guys! Facebook Keeps Your Private Data Private

It seems that I’m finding more and more people that are complaining about Facebook not being a truly “open” platform because it doesn’t let your information out. By keeping all of your data private, and within their system, they aren’t truly open. Or so the theory goes. I’ve written before on what I think about that. I’m not talking just about whether or not we can call it open, though. I’m talking about people complaining that user’s data is kept inside the system. I’m willing to admit that I might be missing something here, but to me, this sounds like the stupidest complaint I’ve ever heard about Facebook. I am baffled at why people would be upset that a company keeps your information so private. Isn’t privacy a big topic right now? Isn’t a company that keeps all your data under tight lock and key a good thing? Facebook isn’t selling this information, they aren’t letting people just gather all this information to use for their own purposes, they are just keeping everything locked up. I don’t want Google to be indexing my Facebook page. I don’t want someone to be able to download all of my data in a convenient Excel file. I should probably point out that this “closed” system they have didn’t use to exist. There was a time where you could click a button and download everything. I actually have a file with about 41,000 people’s contact info in it that I got years ago. It was just a simple export from Facebook. Tell me, do you really want them to go back to that? I’m perfectly happy with Facebook keeping my data behind closed doors, and I’m willing to bet that nearly all of its users feel the same way. I think that the vocal people complaining are definitely the minority view, but it concerns me that they are so vocal. The very people generating all of the buzz for Facebook are also the ones that are saying this. So please, someone explain to me why this would be a good thing for everyone. Either that, or stop complaining about it, and start complementing Facebook for keeping my stuff private.

Be Careful When Emailing That Illegal Stuff

A court has ruled that the government can legally obtain the IPs of your internet traffic, and the header information from emails without a warrant. So when Uncle Sam wants to see what you're up to, they don't need permission to do it...sorta. The exact details of the ruling were not explained, but that's not really the part I care about. I got to talking to a friend about this, and was saying that obtaining the to/from addresses on an email is not all that different from obtaining the to/from addresses on a letter. While there is no examining of the content of the letter, one only has to look at the envelope in order to see this information. What is important is that the court's ruling means that there is not a reasonable expectation of privacy on these email addresses. To me, this seems like (here's where I point out that I have no legal knowledge on this at all) one would not have a reasonable expectation of privacy from the government when sending a letter via USPS either. Arter all, every piece of mail already is getting scanned for routing purposes, so technically speaking government computers are already looking at to/from addresses of your mail. The difference, of course, is the use of that information. Also, currently, unless there's something I don't know, the government doesn't actually have any way of recording this info. Back to the point, though, I wouldn't think that to assume that email wouldn't be protected is that far of a stretch, since I'm assuming snail mail isn't, given the reason I just said (again, if this is just flat out wrong, point it out please).

Careful, Your Stuff Might Have Your Name on It

In case for some reason you haven’t heard yet, Apple is now offering iTunes Plus, which has the EMI music catalog DRM-free. This is definitely a good thing. The DRM-free part, that is. Granted, you’ve been able to get unprotected tracks from a variety of other sources for quite a while now. The difference is that iTunes has the following of the masses. I don’t want to talk about the fact that there are DRM-free tracks now, though, it is the reaction that people are having to them. More specifically, the reaction to what these tracks contain. Embedded in the music files are the name and email address of the person that bought them. This makes people uneasy, and they are all upset that this information is in there. Now, two things. First, this is not something that is unique to the iTunes Plus tracks; it is in every track you buy on iTunes. Second, this information can only be seen if you have access to the file. Now, in theory, shouldn’t the only person that has access to your music on your computer supposed to be you? Are you worried that you aren’t going to be able to share these files with everyone because they have your info in them? I could be wrong, but isn’t distributing music out to a bunch of strangers still a no-no? Don’t get me wrong here, I’m a firm believer that the idea that illegal music sharing creates horrible things is complete BS. I’m just saying that I don’t see why you should be upset that these tracks contain your info. Is this really different than the file properties on a Word doc you make that have your name in the created by item (assuming you’ve registered with your name)? It is just pretty stupid to be upset about having your personal information in something that is, for all intents and purposes, private.

I’m in Your City Photographing Your Buildings

I’m sure you know what I think about the people upset over Google’s new Street View. The stupidity is not just contained at an individual level, though. The U.S. government is shaking in their booties too. They are trying to tell us that terrorists can use services such as Google’s or Microsoft’s to plot out future escapades. My question is, do they really need these tools to plan attacks? Terrorists don’t seem to have any problems getting into our country. Why is it that they can’t just run down to the gas station, buy a map, and then drive around town with a camera? Then they could send this information to their friends back home and they would have exactly the same information that is available to the rest of us. This would even allow for a more specific look at things than the current services offer. I mean, do I think that terrorists can’t use these services, or won’t consider using them? Of course not. I just think that these services aren’t giving them anything they couldn’t already get.