Larry Page: “We’re still waiting” for Facebook to unlock user data
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
The first hypocrisy is the idea of 'Openness', Google often describes their competitors customers as 'hostage' when they won't allow Google access into their system, or 'walled' because they use a closed model. However there is nothing preventing Google from allowing facebook to access Google's data, merely stating reciprocity isn't a reason to keep their own customers 'hostage'. It's simple business, Google wants there to be no competitive advantage. Facebook is significantly larger than Google+, meaning that sharing data will always be in Google's favour. This is why Larry talks it up, not because he's much concerned about users being held 'hostage', but rather he wants an easy way to leech users from facebook into Google+
Next is the idea of 'choice', Google often paints their competitors as giving their users less choice. However when it's convenient for Google's business model, choice is eradicated - between Google's online services and Android users are funnelled into google's services above all others. A trivial example is search where YouTube is highlighted, while 'video' is relegated to the last menu option under 'more'. (YouTube mobile and webm is another example of this leveraging.)
Another often touted soundbite is that Google is all about being truthful, again implying that their competitors blind or mislead their customers to keep them loyal. However Larry would know perfectly well that Chrome's recent ascent to largest market share is a side effect of pre-loading pages, and not representative of actual use. However it's convenient for Google to claim victory here rather than represent actual web use, which sadly appears to still be well within the dominance of IE.
The point I'm making is that Google spends a lot of time trashing it's competitors for doing the exact same things that Google themselves are doing. The only difference is that the competitors aren't sanctimonious by holding up virtues that they can't legitimately claim.
I'm confused; facebook can trivially write software that would allow you to transfer all your G+ data (circles, contacts, +1s, etc.) to facebook using google's APIs. Facebook has no such APIs.
And I think your suggestion that these data liberation APIs exist only because G+ isn't number one doesn't really mesh with history and reality. AFAICT google is pretty committed to allowing the data you put in to come back out.
Basically, if you start indexing the web, and some sites are hosted in blogger, google will block your crawler if I remember correctly
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
There other ways of blocking crawlers other than robots.txt
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /
User-Agent: googlebot
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Perhaps there is a user setting that controls it.
Why can't it be both? And even if it isn't, that's not hypocrisy.
'video' is relegated to the last menu option under 'more'.
When you search for something, "Video" is the third option in the sidebar, which happens to be significantly more visible than the menu.
Another often touted soundbite is that Google is all about being truthful,
Where, and by whom? I think that's just a strawman.
Actually, Google engineers are actively making it possible for users to liberate their data:
http://www.dataliberation.org/
> Google wants there to be no competitive advantage
I believe Google wants users to have the best possible experience, and possession of a user's data should not be "nine-tenths of the law."
> Facebook is significantly larger than Google+, meaning that sharing data will always be in Google's favour.
It may be larger than Google+, but FB's Market Capitalization is $69.5B, while Google is $199.1B. I think this invalidates your argument on this point completely.
This is already shown to be incomplete, and is basically identical to what Facebook allows the user to extract. The 'hostage' scenario described is not being able to easily import your data to another social network.
>I believe Google wants users to have the best possible experience, and possession of a user's data should not be "nine-tenths of the law."
Google definitely want the best experience, as long as it's on their services only. The video searching example is a perfect example, why are other video irrelevant suddenly? They're not, they just don't put money in Google's pocket.
>It may be larger than Google+, but FB's Market Capitalization is $69.5B, while Google is $199.1B. I think this invalidates your argument on this point completely.
Actually now I'm just calling B/S Fanboy alarm. Market cap has no bearing here, facebook only went public 2 days ago, it has no affect on the number of users they have, or that fact that google want a similar number of users for Google+.
The situation is absolutely asymmetric. I can download all of the email addresses of all of my Google Contacts, right now.
That you think Facebook isn't holding your data hostage sounds to me more like Stockholm Syndrome.
Regardless of the relationship between Google and Facebook, it's a good feature that Google allows you to download that. It'd be nice if Facebook offered the same, don't you think?
I don't know what you mean about videos, honestly. If I search for "somebody that I used to know," I see Youtube, vimeo, nbc. And those all have embedded images, enticing you to watch the video. Is your assertion that vimeo "puts money in Google's pocket"? Searching for other videos that I know are not on Youtube produces them in search results, just fine.
If I Google "Robert Scoble Facebook," I can find his page pretty easily. Tell me what to do, within Facebook, to find his Google+ profile?
And you can call fanboy all you want. You apparently think "number of users" is the only metric of value, which is fine - that's your opinion. My opinion is that market cap is a pretty good indication of the relative size of a company, and by that metric, Facebook is the underdog. It's a shame they're also holding my data hostage, because that means I'm not going to root for that underdog.
Come to think of it, even I am unsure about choosing between free market capitalism and having a bunch of old-age senators writing laws about something that they don't understand (considering that they're clueless about the feasibility of implementing what they legislate at the technical level).
2) It opens the door to litigation. "I told gave <web service> <piece of data> and now I can't get it back easily. Give me money". Don't laugh now, because we all know that laws designed to protect IP tend to be abused (patents, copyright, etc.). I'm sure that Europeans will set the precedent for this one with their tracking opt-out laws.
3) What format should it be delivered in? Can Facebook just give you a 100Mb HTML file with all of the things you've "liked" or does it have to be more accessible? Is a purely machine readable format alright or must it be human readable too?
Of course, it's possible to create a law which gives just the right amount of data freedom to users WITHOUT turning every social website into a horrible Dropbox clone, but there's a very fine line between making legislation toothless and making it pedantic.
If it were implemented as a "convenient" export button, then it would offer a "convenient" way to easily steal all your data. Leave your computer for a second or accidentally forget to log off at the library or apple store? Anyone can come in and download your entire history and pictures and chat logs and who knows what else.
"that's not realistic because it would take too long" or "just ask for password again when you export". OK, but now you've made it even more enticing to steal someone's password since you've created a super easy vector to then gain access to all their info, possibly nicely organized as well. In this sense its kind of nice that its pretty difficult to get old info off of facebook currently.
Secondly, what counts as social network data and what doesn't? Should amazon be forced to provide you with an export of all your purchases so that another web store can offer you as good suggestions and prevent lock-in to amazon? Arguably amazon (or any web store) has already proven to better use this data, and it's as real or more real than facebooks data. How about my Starcraft stats and battle.net chat logs? I know, let's have a long series of litigations to figure this out, in the meanwhile creating a scary and perhaps prohibitively expensive proposition to any new startup that plans to use your prior behavior/data to enhance your future experience.
If you left your computer, then you have bigger issues to worry about (i.e., it being stolen, searching through your emails for CC info, etc). In other words, the malicious use of an export button is no bigger of a problem than it already is to leave your belongings unattended in a public space.
> But now you've made it even more enticing to steal someone's password
It is already enticing to steal someone's password because more often than not people use the same password across services anyway.
I can see where you're coming from on your second point, but I'm of the opinion I should be able to take the data I'm putting into a service (reviews, chats, messages, etc) with me -- it doesn't prevent the service from still monetizing that data (through ads, suggested products, etc), and if anything it continues to give the service an incentive to make their platform better so I would want to stick around with them only because of their superior recommendations and whatnot.
I see this working just like Open Auth. You are on site X. You tell them you want to import your data from site Y. You authenticate yourself, and (insert a waiting period here if you like) then site X pulls your data from site Y in some conveniently packaged format, which is irrelevant to you, the user. Currently do you care how G+, FB, Twitter, etc. store your data? Then why should you care how they export it from Y to X?
Larry Page said repeatedly the future of search, the next step, is learning about you. You personally and how when you search for "Ted Smith" the results show the results relevant to the Ted Smith you are connected to.
There would be huge benefits to having all Facebook data searchable by Google, but the issue is privacy and whether people should have the choice to keep this information separate. The debate is both for a business one for the companies involved and a philosophical one.
Burnt me pretty badly when I lost all my apps.
Edit: it appears this might have been added in Ice Cream Sandwich, but I can't find mention of it as a new feature, just people recommending the upgrade to avoid the reset.
It appears as an option so you'd assume it just does it, but when you go ahead and try it, it's just a friendly message telling you that you actually need to do a factory reset and a friendly warning that you will lose all your information and installed applications. There are ways - 3rd party apps - to easily restore/backup app lists but you usually lose any app information you had there, like hiscores or contacts for instance, and of course paid apps.
Google social engineering at its best.
Plus you have to lose all of data stored in any non-downloaded Google apps, for the same reason. There are a few things left (e.g. alarms and the non-Gmail email app), but I think it is entirely reasonable that Google didn't spend a lot of effort on that corner-case - especially since the main privacy risk is an incomplete log off that leaves behind something it shouldn't.
But wait, there's more. They also delete the contacts, both those stored in the account (those, understandably) and those stored in the phone. Did I mention they force a FACTORY RESET? call logs, notes, saved app data, you get the idea.
If you root your phone you can solve this, and even without rooting there are still hacks to avoid the deletion, proving that this is perfectly possible. But Google prefers to make it a DESTRUCTIVE thing for you to try and circumvent being tracked at all times.
It's not a corner case. A lot of us don't want to be tracked at all times.
What about non-Google apps that use Google services / APIs on your behalf? What about apps that were non-Google when you downloaded them but were later bought by Google? And on and on.
Plus, other people are going to draw the line in different places. Should Google present a giant switchboard where you can decide exactly what to keep and what to get rid of? I feel sure that if they had, someone else would be here talking about Google's "social engineering" because they make the process of deactivating your Google account on an Android device so complicated.
The overwhelmingly commonest case for deactivating the primary Google account on an Android device is because you're giving that device to someone else. In that case you almost always actively want a factory reset. It is entirely reasonable for Google to keep things simple and optimize for that.
In most other cases, the data (not apps) you're talking about is either backed up to your Google account and/or can be straightforwardly backed up another way (e.g. apps letting you export to the SD card, emailing yourself notes, etc.). Dealing with those sorts of issues in your corner case isn't an unreasonable burden (contrast this with the Facebook situation, where almost everyone exporting their contacts from Facebook wants the email addresses, too).
It's pretty simple really. I just want them to let me delete the account and just the account, leaving my stuff alone and destroying nothing. Just like it happens when you do it with a rooted device.
Titanium Backup restores practically everything, including application data like high scores.
I am sure that Congress could eventually interfere and set certain rules around the handling of personal data, but more likely, we will soon start seeing alternate technical solutions which puts each user's data in that specific user's hands.
There will come a time when it will not be ethical for companies to store un-encrypted personal data.
I had to scroll two screens down to find your comment.
At some point Google and Facebook(and everyone else, these two are just the most popular right now) inverted the rules. Years ago it was completely unacceptable for any piece of software to mine any piece of data without your consent. Screens had to be shown explicitly "do you authorize we contact server X in order to send data Y?"
Fast forward a few years and these companies are out there providing Javascript libraries that are essentially urchins on every web page. Every web site which uses Google gadgets for example, like maps or adsense or whatever is giving their visitor's client data to Google - screen resolution, IP address, web browser used, allows them to set tracking cookies, etc.... Same with Facebook javascript gadgets. Since when is this OK?
This would have been completely unacceptable a few years ago but somewhere it got lost. Now it's not only ok for Google and Facebook to track you everywhere, it also seems to be OK to FIGHT over having access to even more data!
The whole privacy thing has been turned upside down. These people are not fighting for our privacy, they are fighting over who gets to access MORE of our personal data.
Privacy needs to be baked into the internet. This is more central to human needs than a google search or facebook connection. People are doing what is easy and using these services, but once a true privacy service comes up neither Larry/Sergey or Zuch will know how to respond. This will likely be outside of their mental framework and new privacy centric companies will emerge.
This decision was made long ago. The remedy is called habeas data and YOU own your personal data and nobody else. Whether other parties(like an employer) can USE your data, is a matter of contract and agreement. But who owns it is already decided.
But how about if Google collects its OWN information about me. Does that fall under habeas data?
Anyone whom you suspect has data on you can be subpoenaed to give you, and only you, the data they have about you. The government included, even spy agencies - you have the right to request your personal information from any other person, corporation or governmental agency.
1. Go to Accounts Settings in Facebook. 2. Find a link "Download a copy of your Facebook data".
Data includes all your wall posts, photos and friends names plus their email addresses.
Really?
Those were removed for quite a while. If they're available now, it's kind of a big deal.
Allow friends to include my email address in Download Your Information.
Google makes data available through the (roughly) 27 APIs, but a lot of them would be expensive to use on a large scale.
Does Google expect FB to provide user data for free or very low cost, or are they offering real money?
http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/
http://blog.databigbang.com/the-data-portability-fact-sheet/
http://blog.databigbang.com/extraction-of-main-text-content/
(2) There's no way to get my tracked clicktrails as collected by other Google properties (analytics, adsense, G+, etc.)
Related, but going beyond my original point: Google is also unlikely to ever allow exporting all the signals about me they've collected, and are now using to 'personalize' search results. Fine, they're protecting the proprietary advantage they've built up, with my acquiescence, over time. But so is Facebook.
It'd be nicer if they included paging URLs in the RSS itself, though.
Re: (2), while I wish they'd let you collect that, I think there's a difference between data you generate while using their services and data generated elsewhere that you feed them.
(I wonder if a request under the same EU directive that forced Facebook to give you all that stuff back would force Google to give you those trails too)
I wish people would read privacy policies before they're critical of them...
But now, the user data belongs to the user and not Facebook and they want to access it.
[Edit: Typos]
I don't want Google near my user info.