Tim Berners-Lee: Tell Facebook, Google you want your data back
news.cnet.com
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I periodically use this feature, to see if it has improved any since it's initial disappointing release. As of a few weeks ago, it has not.
A true data download from Facebook would consist of: a machine-readable form of every action I've taken on Facebook (likes, friend requests sent/received, photos I added tags to, photos uploaded, status updates, messages sent/received, comments made, etc.) along with timestamps and at least URIs pointing to the objects referenced (photos, people, etc.) if not a copy of my view of those objects.
(I understand why Facebook might claim they shouldnt give me, for example, dates that other people de-friend me, since that isn't accessible info. However, I do think that copies of statuses I commented on and can still see isn't unreasonable)
What we have now is: A static HTML dump of your profile page, photo page, and messages that is massively incomplete. Since the switch to timeline, fewer actions I have taken in the past seem to qualify for inclusion on my page ("moxiemk1 commented on friend's photo" used to feature more often in my profile than it does now). Since the revamped messages/chat integration, the messages dump (which always eventually cut off at some point in the past) is even smaller, and harder to read.
I would indeed like to have copies of the data I've created, and would like to emphasize that Facebook's "effort" to do so is complete BS.
The logical conclusion of that is they have absolutely no incentive to give you your data back, in fact they view that as their data, earned by offering you the service of sharing stuff with your friends, without having to set up your own website. That data is their crown jewels, so I am amazed that anyone would expect them to give it up, or be surprised at their reluctance - this is the very essence of Facebook, and they've done very well out of it.
That's not to say that you should never use Facebook, but just that if you do use a free service like Facebook, you should expect to give up some of your privacy and control over your data in return. If you don't want to do that, it would be better to use another service (which doesn't rely on selling your data as their business model).
One part of EU law is that people have the right to access all personal data that a company holds on them. Here's an example of how to make such a request. http://europe-v-facebook.org/
You might claim "people voluntarily choose to join a free service, what right do you have to demand anything?" however that's not how laws work. Facebook is legally obliged to give non-US customers their data.
I think you're missing the point. Facebook doesn't have to hand out a text file with your name and a list of all your friends for it to be considered "selling your data".
It's considered "selling your data" when you go to an unrelated site and that site gives you customized content based on information you gave to Facebook.
FWIW, I'll take a look at the next hackathon.
I assume they have a low priority batch system to handle these requests.
Google's realtime search used to provide the ability to search and retrieve tweets from a specific date and time in the past, but twitter cancelled that deal and haven't provided any decent replacement.
A publicly accessible archive has huge potential for research. A friend of mine used Google's realtime search to pin point and keep record of the first tweets out of Christchurch following the Christchurch earthquake. Sadly there is no way to do this now and twitter don't seem to care.
Presumably the target customer is researchers of the finance-sector variety rather than researchers of the sociology or history-department variety...
Data ownership without portability is a moot point. Many services allow you to download a blob of your content but that's of little to no value for most users. What we really need (it's 2012 after-all) is a more thought out system where the user actually owns and controls their data and gives applications access to them.
This means multiple applications can leverage the same set of data and the user doesn't have to continue using any of them. Basically, there's no single point of failure in terms of data interoperability.
Currently, a user's Facebook content can be used by other services but for this to remain the user must keep their Facebook account open.
We're solving this problem by letting the user grant OpenPhoto software access to their photos. Most likely it's a bunch of photos that reside in their dropbox account but could also be an S3 bucket or box.net account once those become more consumer friendly.
http://theopenphotoproject.org or https://openphoto.me if you want to sign up for a hosted account.
I love the metaphor. I want Facebook and Google to have my data, because they can't give me good service without it. Unfortunately, as a consumer, giving Facebook or Google access to your data is akin to the Native Americans welcoming the Europeans to their continent. You have no rights, and the balance of power is against you. They own your data now, and you may use whatever part of it they give you permission to use, in the manner they give you permission to use it.
Your metaphor is beautiful, instantly understandable, and puts them in their rightful place as service providers, not overlords.
There's a lot here. If they do get access to your data they'd most likely annotate it and provide you an enhanced experience on data that is owned by them (their annotations on your data). But I think that's okay. We have to be pragmatic here and say that in the example of photos if you give Google access to your photos to display in your G+ account and they collect +'s and comments perhaps it's okay that they "own" that content. As a user you still are better off than today and maybe it's a progression to where more and more data is portable and owned by you...but we have to start somewhere :)
We're completely at their mercy for all the data we create in their apps, and therefore we're completely dependent on two things:
1) They want to retain customer trust. 2) They are concerned that they might lose that trust if they misbehave.
They're constantly testing the limits of 2) (intentionally or unintentionally.) At some point 1) could cease to be true. They could become so necessary, or so powerful, that people become cynical about the possibility of defying them, and therefore start accepting abusive behavior.
Another scenario is that they could stop caring about customer trust not because they're too powerful but because customers have already abandoned them. Imagine that in 2022 Facebook is a has-been. It has been beaten in social networking, or social networking sounds ridiculously quaint in 2022, and Facebook is a failing company with no prospects for revival. Kind of like SCO. And it happens to possess, as its only asset, a little bit of intellectual "property" (a decade of personal information on a billion people.) Perhaps, in its death throes, it will go the way of SCO, abandon all moral restraint, and attempt to squeeze a windfall out of that "property" in the most cynical way possible. Maybe they'll charge you a ridiculous fee to retrieve your data in a useable form. If their user agreements make that impossible, someone in the company might go rogue and sell all your private data to a shady entrepreneur in a lawless country. They could sell the photos to Joe Francis and individual account histories to blackmailers and gossips. We know that won't happen today, because Facebook has the resources and the motivation to make sure it doesn't happen, but if the company goes to hell, we won't have those assurances anymore.
Major generation gap and sophistication gap here. This is why the issue of data ownership took so long to get traction. For most people, data is invisible and using it is magic. The only difference people noticed when they lost control of their data was that they could suddenly access it everywhere!
The difference between owning your data and not owning it is like the difference between living in a country with civil liberties and legal protections versus living in a country without civil liberties and effective legal protections. The difference is abstract and meaningless until it becomes a matter of life and death, when you end up in a situation that you only thought existed in paranoid fantasies.
The invisible change from owning your data to being owned by Facebook and Google happened to correspond to a very noticeable improvement in convenience for users. As in more dramatic examples from history, an authoritarian regime has delivered in a way that its predecessor could not, and as a result, people have embraced it. It doesn't mean that people accept its ideology. The way we think about Facebook, the way anybody thinks about Facebook who engages in these conversations about web industry economics, and therefore how Facebook thinks about itself, is much darker and more sinister than the aspect of Facebook that users embrace. Users embrace the effect that Facebook has had on their lives, which is overwhelmingly positive. The side we see is not something they embrace; it is something they have barely begun to consider. I have faith that they will react to it as we do.
We are not more sensitive to freedom than they are; we are merely face to face with the problem because we like to imagine ourselves in Facebook's shoes :-) We imagine what it's like to have that power; we are able to think in a predatory, profit-oriented mindset; we understand the temptation. We don't have to be evil to see the temptations that Facebook faces. And we understand that a person can withstand temptation, but a corporation cannot. A corporation cannot withstand the temptation to make money. Only as long as its profits exceed the wildest demands, anyway. When profits flag, a corporation will collapse to the moral lowest common denominator, because the people who resist immoral profits will be replaced.
Like I said, we don't have to worry that the average Facebook user is okay with the dire scenario of Facebook fully and amorally exploiting its power. It's completely imaginary at the moment. Those who worry about it worry alone, but only because we are uniquely positioned to imagine it. We can make other people understand. Right now Facebook's major sin has been to appropriate a dangerous and therefore immoral amount of power. They haven't abused it yet, not the way they could. I think with the right kind of education, users will revolt and demand rights and control before Facebook breaks down and really abuses the terrifying power it has amassed.
Am I too optimistic?
We have been working on a project called TheMux [1] that aims to create a data platform (for lack of a better term) which helps you to pull in and archive your data from various sources and apply some simple normalization. We're specifically working on ways to keep both content (blog posts, photos, status updates, etc) and datum (health info, workouts, communication data, etc) in a form where you a) have full control of the raw data and b) can make select data available to external apps which do things like presentation and analysis.
Our goal is to create an open-source platform to address some of these questions around data ownership, access and portability. Imagine the day when you decide that you want to move your blog from Tumblebook to Posterpress and you can do that by simply creating a new account on Posterpress and granting it access to your existing data. Or you've been using JogKeeper but then you find this great new service called SprintTracker that you want to try out - and all you need to do is connect and it will have your years worth of running data.
And we think that something like this will also make it much simpler for SaaS developers to compete not by customer lock-in but rather by providing superior products and continually working to make the customer happy.
We're taking it slowly right now to build this platform which we will open-source under a permissive license (as soon as it's a little more mature) by first building a few consumer-oriented services on top of it. Number 1 on our list is a blog-type website based on this MuxDB concept and that's what we're working on at the moment.
If you're interested in giving us your thoughts (or help, or tell us we're crazy, or whatever), my email is in my profile.
One possible marketing phrase that's been thrown around is "data asymmetry", as in "TheMux aims to rectify the massive data asymmetries that give Facebook and Google orders of magnitude more power than their users."
Even better would be the development of a completely peer-to-peer version of Facebook (which Diaspora isn't).
Re: replacement of Facebook, I don't think it's realistic for someone to develop an actually decent federated replacement for a true social network. The difficulty of doing some of the stuff that Facebook users like, but trying to make it work when all of the nodes are on different networks with different constraints, seems to be very high.
I'm not so much in the "Facebook shouldn't have my data" camp... more like the "I want control of my all data TOO" camp.
Our concept for people writing apps that leverage TheMux doesn't require them to actually load data live from their user's instance of TheMux (because that's crazy, a single point of failure, and probably very inefficient) but that there is simply the agreement to interchange data.
To steal your phrase - we want to make the data symmetric.
So that no matter where I create or update my data, the systems involved makes a best-effort to return that data to my MuxDB, and then my MuxDB will make a best-effort to get that data out to the sites I've authorized and who need the data to do what I've signed up for.
Obviously, we're still in the early stages, but it's been an exciting and challenging journey so far.
It would have a set of standards that make it easy to request commonly used pieces of information: name, primary-email, avatar, etc. You could even store passwords in it, or more likely just sidestep the need for passwords all together, since it could essentially be a global login. You would never have to fill out forms for registrations, credit card info, etc.
For sites that you don't want to give your personal information to, you just give access to a secondary set of data instead, with values for your internet nickname and persona.
Of course, there'd be big security challenges, but I think that would be a neat solution to issues with online identity and personal data.
Probably the closest there is is the blog-o-sphere and/or the internet in general? I can host my photos on a website, and email that to a friend? Someone can subscribe to my RSS feed of my blog, etc.
A peer being an Free Software server, which anybody can host: Appleseed, Diaspora, Elgg, and many more.
A peer being like a file-sharing application running on each persons computer: XMPP would be a good start, but I don't know any projects, who have built something noteworthy on top. The big problems: Friends must be able to interact with me, while I'm offline. Browser integration for "share buttons".
See:
Technology can definitely make a difference.
Last week you sat on the bus next to someone who has been diagnosed with Avian flu - would you like me to schedule a doctor's appointment for you?
Useful applications will pop up soon enough if they make truly open apis and downloadable data. He's not suggesting google/facbook actually implement the statistics themselves. In fact the opposite, because that would still mean the data was closed.