Is social graph portability workable?
digitopoly.org
digitopoly.org
I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just delete years of photos, posts, likes, comments, etc. Everything. Then these two surprising things happened:
Having used Google Takeout many times, with great results, I decided to do the same with FB. For years I used FB as my primary way of storing and sharing photos from my phone (vs my desktop for a DSLR), so there were a lot of photos there that I didn't have anywhere else (pre-Google Photos times).
When I downloaded, I was surprised: Facebook downsized all my photos to 90's-era 800x600 pixels, and stripped ALL metadata from it (date, hour, location, camera, etc.). This pissed me off so much. FB wasn't just "not doing a good job", they were purposefully sending me a big "fuck you" letter as I removed my content. FB still had all my images in the original size, and with the metadata, but they chose to give me a shitty version of them.
This isn't laziness or incompetence, it's just plain evil.
My second surprise was how hard it is to delete content on FB. There's no "delete all", or even a "select and delete". You need to manually click 2-4 times for every single comment, post, picture, etc on a laggy user interface. It almost looks purposefully designed to prevent you from doing so.
There are some Chrome extensions that try to automate that, making deleting 1000's of items faster, but FB is constantly trying to break them.
So the message is clear: FB doesn't give a fuck about you, and will try its best to fuck you if you want to delete content or even get it back. Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back.
PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite.
Yeah, they still have the photos though. IIRC, when you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a worldwide unlimited license to your photo, so there's really no reason for them to delete it. I suppose they can even use it for marketing purposes.
You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc. and go to town.
Full resolution everything.
Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way.
Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke keys of such an app?
FOUND THEM:
Odrive
Fotobounce
Except, of course, that they do. Because we let them.
Your argument is the very thing I was referring to with the last sentence in my previous post. "They can do what they want with it, and you're wrong for thinking otherwise" is, besides being factually void, the kind of rationalization that lets FB jerk its users around like this.
[0] Yes, in fact, it is my content; I granted them a specifically constrained license, allowing them to use that content, in order to serve my and others' use of it. That's all. There is nothing whatsoever about not having to give back exactly what I uploaded, under any circumstance.
From the Fine ToS [1]:
> 2. Sharing Your Content and Information
You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
Nothing in that snippet, or anything else in the ToS grants them the right only to give back "lesser" versions of the content I uploaded. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to saying that, should I use the tool they provide to download all of my content, I have to suck it up that it will have all vowels elided.
“People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them,”
“At a high level we’ve built two different things, Facebook Connect — which is our real effort to bring our sites to other sites, and “Download Your Information” where you can download your information and upload it to another site. Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”
As usual, it looks like this was just PR.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40441434
"We can also demand to know how our data is being used and withdraw consent whenever we like."
Combine that with the controversial "right to be forgotten", and I imagine that someone could successfully sue Facebook for lack of a "delete all", and for keeping images around on their servers after deletion.
When we look back, I think we will see that in abandoning email as the medium of social interaction, we basically gave up on the open internet.
An only tangentially related anecdote: SMTP and later XMPP offered beautifully portable social graphs. In fact, in 2012, I found it so portable that I decided to migrate off the self-hosted postfix/dovecot/ejabberd install I'd run on my own domain for years to GApps. Cue the replacement of GTalk with Hangouts, and now I really don't have much of a choice but to pay Google each month, or discard/re-establish the social connections I've built over the last decade and a half.
A) Wide global adoption
B) Decades of use
HTTP?
I'm not sure of your point. Http also allows you to identify the server. Forwarding mail servers are analogous to caching and forwarding proxies.
> other metadata and separate them from the message
Just like http.
> HTTP is just "this is the filename, this is the data.." It's not much more than a TCP stream really
No, it isn't. No more than SMTP, IMAP, and pop3 are.
What's the difference? An email address isn't a person, nor does it represent one.
> I truly don't understand why you're on about servers and transport protocols when this thread is about social networks.
Because it was mentioned that SMTP is the only decentralized protocol, and I disagreed.
People in various compromised situations use it because it doesn't need a phone number (unlike a rapidly growing amount of social networks.) I've set up dates over email, most of my work is done over email. I tell people to email me rather than text me because I am /much/ more likely to get an email (and get it quickly, thanks to IMAP IDLE.) It's the only thing I get notifications for on my laptop and the only thing I reliably get notifications for on my phone.
It's not abandoned, it's just not as hip as snapchat.
Making social networks speak together is probably a good order of magnitude harder than unifying the IM networks, and even after a decade+ of effort and tons and tons of work, the multiprotocol IM clients are still generally quirky, involve losing useful features from any given specific network, and face constant issues where the semantics of the networks differ. (Especially around conferencing.)
Shared social graphs is a nice idea, but it would take enormous effort backed by legal force to happen, at a minimum.
Wikipedia didn't arise where Britannica had a monopoly.
The industry changed, and the segment where Windows had a monopoly became less relevant, the same with Britannica.
Windows still retains 90%+ market share on desktops.
By the way - I am surprised Windows is used so much on laptops because I see mostly Macs since 2008!
Actually the XMPP protocol already has a distributed social graph, and there are micro blogging extensions (eg. Movim), so we can get a functional distributed social network basically overnight.
The problem is that (a) you can't monetize an open, distributed network, so the incumbents will do everything they can to prevent federation, and (b) the only driving force that remains are the nerdy volunteers, who have a limited impact, even if they are able to tackle the UX challenges.
Facebook would be forbidden from storing any information about you, except for the fact that your friends on Facebook had manually specified your ID as someone who could view their posts.
If your ID provider also ran a social network, and allowed people to log in with their Facebook accounts to view your posts, then that would cover a lot of use cases.
The next step would be to allow/require Facebook to fetch RSS-style feeds of events from your social network, so that Facebook users would be alerted to your new posts, without having to manually browse to all the different sites that their friends are on. This would require more engineering work, but could perhaps be implemented as a browser plugin.
At some point, if Facebook are making it unreasonably hard for competitors' users to interoperate with users on Facebook, there would be grounds for an anti-trust case against Facebook, which I'm sure the EU would be happy to consider.
It seems to me that a big problem is avoiding feature creep. I don't want or need a full browser experience for everything because it will break any customization I have set up.
This is a hard problem to solve. We solved it at Qbix. We're still working on releasing our Platform to everyone, but for now it's already open source and we are dogfooding it in all our own apps.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are also working on an interoperable auth protocol where you do control your identity and keep your contacts private, but discover them across communities (venues and interests).